Hi Florian, hi Jim, Please find attached an updated version of NOVOLTRK.ZIP (1.31 as of 2004-03-17), the \NoVolTrack\ registry patch for Windows 95/98/SE/ME to keep it from corrupting (known) OEM labels in disk boot sectors on any read or read-write access to a removable medium. Background: In contrast to official documentation and popular belief MS-DOS 3.1 (possibly earlier)- 6.22, MS-DOS 7.0 - 8.0 (Windows 95/98/SE/ME), PC DOS 3.1 (possibly earlier)- 7.0/2000 & 7.1, and OS/2 depend on the disk OEM label to be in a special format in order to correctly log-in certain disks. (DR-DOS, FreeDOS, Linux, and Windows NT/2000/XP are not affected.) The "Volume Tracker" in Windows 95/98/SE/ME will overwrite the disk OEM label on the first access to the medium by some kind of "?????IHC" pattern containing a CRC or session ID or such. This should help keeping track of removable media, however, there are other solutions to this problem and changing the OEM label may cause serious harm to the disk, if it is not in a format still recognized by Windows afterwards (many disks formatted with 3rd-party software are not). Once the OEM labels got changed, the disk may no longer be recognized by Windows after the next eject/insert cycle and cause faulty (!) error messages to occur leading to the wrong (!) assumption that the medium would somehow suddenly be damaged or weak. Whilst these disks are still readable by operating systems not evaluating the OEM label in any way (for example DR-DOS or FreeDOS), depending on the actual format of the disk, a changed OEM label may also make the disk unusable for its original purposes (for example, as installation disk, as flash disk, or as backup disk, etc.). Unless this patch gets applied to the registry, the only way to keep "Volume Tracker" from acting this way is to leave the disk's write- protection lever in the read-only position even on something as simple and seemingly harmless as a "DIR a:"! Disks having been corrupted by Windows 95/98/SE/ME already can be "fixed" by patching the 8-byte OEM label entry in the boot sector back to the original value with a disk editor. Unfortunately, it may be impossible to find out the original OEM label in particular on special purpose disks, which have hold serial numbers or other special codes there. In so far, Windows' behaviour must be considered very dangerous and it may cause serious loss of data. For most Windows-corrupted DR-DOS formatted disks, an OEM label "IBM 3.3" should help to "fix" the problem, but this does not necessarily apply to other disks. If someone knows more boot sector OEM labels in use somewhere, please report. Greetings, Matthias -- ; http://www.uni-bonn.de/~uzs180/mpdokeng.html; http://mpaul.drdos.org