right you are, new disk image on flash drive, opens just like the original, thanks very much. [oddly enough when the flash drive light was finished flashing!! i tapped a key i'd tapped before and this time the screen resumed appropriate display] now i can think about what else to do with that ibook ...

ps..just had chat with owner/previous operator of ibook--the black screen is not a new problem, sleep management issues, perhaps poor system battery, hard shutdown only cure for blackscreen--so i'll wait for the flash drive light to return to steady state, wait a bit longer, try the reset button, i ...

great! however, i had to go away from the ibook computer for a few minutes and when i returned just now the screen was black, i could hear the compu working and i could see the blue light in the flash drive blinking [usually it's steady] so i assumed that the flashdrive was being written to...i ...

okay, thanks, i double-clicked the flash drive entry in the list of items in the equivalent window/screenshot which appeared on my desktop, then the flash drive name apperared in the top left corner of that window, i clicked the save button
i think, and now a progess bar window called zeroing ...

thx for the quick reply: i'm in os 8.6, an icon for the flash drive appears on the desktop [when i double-click on it an empty window appears with the flash drive's name in the title bar]--does this mean it's mounted? , the screenshot is just like what i see when i choose 'create image from disk ...

no i need, i think , to create a disk image to recreate the legacy programs to read the data files they created...old accounting software. i can't find the way to choose a destination for the image file and i was exploring other copy options to see what happened...sorry to have shifted focus there ...

of course when i tried erase disk just now the format dialog box was active...
the mount box is ticked by default in the disk copy window, is this important?
the hard drive is 3gb with 1.8gb vacant. when i drag and drop the macintosh hd
icon onto the usb drive icon the dialog window tells me copying ...

i tried reformatting via erase disk but the format dialog did not appear so i used
a linux os as outlined above--

so far so good: usb drive formatted macos extended, disk copy on restore cd installed, i can choose hard drive in create image from disc---but i can't find where to choose destination ...

thanks for the response; search with sherlock for local file with 'Disk Copy' in the name returns nothing--i'll try the restore cd...when os8.6 first read the usb
thumb drive it immediately asked to reformat it to macos or macos extended or dos.
i chose dos, unfortunately, because i haven't found a ...

the g3-300mhz, 256ram, 3gb harddrive has legacy software and the financial files
it created. the machine recognises a 2gb usb flashdrive, in fact it insisted that the native vfat format be redone in dos, macos, or macos extended. i want to be able to preserve the files and read them if needed. is ...