In a message dated 12/29/2000 9:13:20 PM Eastern Standard Time, mikeford(a)socal.rr.com writes: I downloaded and ran Memtest86 on my Cel 500 w/144 MB SDRAM. The memory passed and the machine suffered no harm. As Sellam and Wizard suggested, it was probably just a coincidence that your hdd croaked after running this program. Also, your mention that it took you 3 attempts to create the bootable disk suggests that your download may have been faulty. If the code was damaged during transmission then it's possible that running the program could have caused trash to be written to the hdd. Or maybe your fdd is flaky and the boot disk wasn't right. A bummer, at any rate :>( Glen 0/0