I am currently employed as an SNA engineer, i need to be able to copy 5 inch disks, but they must be formated to IBM 3870 format, so i need some software to do the format and then a decent bit copier. or preferably a bit of software that formats as it copies, desperate. please help

I don't exactly understand what the problem is, here. You must have a 5 1/4 drive? If so, the standard Dos/Windows "diskcopy" will do what you want, but it MUST be two discs of like size and format. You cannot "diskcopy" a 5 1/4 disk toa 3 1/2 disk.

would you like to make a bet on that name I just copy a 5 1/4 360kb to a 1.44 mb floppy disk with no problem

Diskcopy, I think, insists on identical capacities... plain old copy doesn't care, as long as there's room. Not sure what Gloversden means tho' - IBM 3780 would seem to be a print standard (?) Plenty of ways to copy disks - you can even do it bit by bit from debug - don't ask me how, I forgot as soon as I was told *g* Maybe WinImage or the Herne Data Systems free formatter?

WinImage will do it'or at lease it did for me

Or....... Make a dir on your hard drive .....copy b:\5.25 to it then copy the contents of the dir onto a:\3.50. Copys are fine unless there is a copy protection scheme working. off and running. W.L.

You are talking about 5 1/4" disks? Mainframe questions seldom come up here. If you are able to use MS-DOS at all, versions 7.0 and above have an /h swithc that copies hidden files as does DR-DOS. I don't know anything about specialized software. You will pay through the nose, but you can phone Microsoft if all else fails.