Thanks Ted, Adam, Wayne and Tony for useful thoughts Ted, my blood ran cold when I read your warning about BIOS settings on the hd. Fortunately I remember going into BIOS since installing the new unformatted drive to make sure the CD was set as boot device- then running Partition Magic just to check the drive was functional as I want to leave feedback on ebay for the thing. I also booted Knoppix which is about all I can use with no hard drive at all, so thankfully the BIOS seems intact. Knoppix froze on me after about five minutes though, so maybe even this needs an hd to be present. I do seem to recall the XP installer mentioning a small area of disk as something like 'unused' or 'unformatted', only about 2-300 meg I think, when I installed it over the factory W98. Maybe this was where 98 had 'squirted' its recovery/hibernation info. I quite agree that this kind of behaviour, plus the absurdity of making recovery data available only on a device which will be dead if it is needed, is a pretty poor show. With a totally new hd any hidden diagnostic or system specific tools are lost now. I do plan one day to have a go with the "ThinkPad Configuration Tools for Linux" tpctl package that can give you such things as on-screen volume display, power management, trackpoint configuration etc. Details at http://tpctl.sourceforge.net/ if anyone is interested. Tony, though the windows labels for all your bits C:, F: etc. are not much use in linux for the reasons given, you should still be able to mount these as you please using device paths like /dev/hda1 etc. Apologies if this is blindingly obvious but I was pleased when I realised it! I had a FAT32 partition automounting rw as /exchange and an NTFS one as /xp where 'My Documents' was. The fact that NTFS write support in linux seems to be less than fully reliable is one reason why I didn't want to set up my XP partition with the Sarge d-i by the way, even if that option were offered. In fact I am thinking of putting 'My Documents' entirely on FAT32 when I reinstall so that everything is easily accessible from both OSs, unless there are compelling performance or reliability reasons not so to do. For example it would be nice to be able to access my mp3 library from both linux and XP. I reckon something like this will do hda1 8G NTFS XP C: or /bloat hda2 8G ext3 Sarge or Ubuntu / hda3 23G FAT32 'My Documents'E: or /xp hda4 20G ext3 /home hda5 1G swap (machine has 256M RAM) Best wishes, Rob Rob Grant Tutor in Economics School of Development Studies University of East Anglia NR4 7TJ +44(0)1603592324 r.grant@uea.ac.uk