Joe wrote: This made think of a problem my friend was trying to solve a while ago. His boss asked him to fix a 386 because of a quite spectacular Windows 3.11 crash. My friend couldn't even format the hard drive using the traditional MS-DOS format programs so he tried the Packard Bell diagnostic disk that had come with his old 486 (terrible machine, everything was built into the motherboard). It turned out that it was doing a low-level format which killed the IDE drive. I've never understood why Packard Bell who sold many of their computers to novices would ship something that could damage the hardware. To save face my friend just said the Windows crash had messed up the machine and I let him have one of the 40Mb hard drives I owned at the time. -- Gareth Knight Amiga Interactive Guide | ICQ No. 24185856 http://welcome.to/aig | "Shine on your star"