I've lost/broken the extended-partitions-chain of my valuable old NativeOberon IDE-disk. Which also contains the logs and instructions of how I previously fixed such! Because of NO's flat-file-sytem, we used partitions to separate topics. This worked quiet well, except that if you had 10 topics, and 2 backups, that needed 30 partitions, just for data. Vaguely, I remember tracing the location and structure of N-O's directory within the partition/S. N-O's Partitions.ShowBlocks IDE0#00 0 2 ~ which gives eg:-- IDE0#00 0 00000000 EB 3E C0 8E D0 BC 00 7C 8B F4 50 07 50 1F FB FC .>.....|..P.P... 00000010 BF 00 06 B9 00 01 F2 A5 EA 1D 06 00 00 BE BE 07 ................ 00000020 B3 04 80 3C 80 74 0E 80 3C 00 75 1C 83 C6 10 FE ...<.t..<.u..... ... can be conveniently duplicated by LEO's:- System.Execute dd if=/dev/hdb count=2 | hexdump -C It sound easy: * from saved partition data: you know the start & end sector of each partition. * using `dd` as above, either directly from *nix or more conveniently [to capture the logs] from LEO, you can examine any sector; or even do: <skip to SectorN, count Msectors | output in HexDumpFormat | but show only lines containing my searchKey>. So far the dataFlood has overwhelmed me. Q1. Is NO's file-directory started at a fixed-sector-count from the sector start? Where is it? Q2. Where's the info about NO's file dir? Many apparent NO:file-directory sections have been seen, which have convenient, multiple of 16-byte size; but their start locations differ between different partitions. As if the File-Dir is floating. For some years now, I've used only LEO, which has/needs no knowledge of my above questions. Under *nix old N-O files are most conveniently accessed by LNO. == Chris Glur.