Hi All There's not much real relevance to this post other than to mention a couple of good distros and some bits I discovered. I've got a couple of Laptops in at the minute (WinXP) that have problems the one has a rubbish key board so reinstalling wont work with an external one as the USB ports don't work at BIOS level the other refuses to let you access the HDD from any windows box. "I know I'll use a LiveCD" (Not the one Stuart was on about by the way) not having anything to hand I downloaded the latest Knoppix disc. Beryl comes as standard now that's pretty cool for a LiveCD so if you fancy having a look at beryl but don't fancy installing it give knoppix a try, I must have done something wrong because even after changing the language some of the items were still in German. I have an old Ubuntu Live CD I'm not a great fan of this over hyped distro but it is very good for getting people with little to no skill out of the do do. True I had to do #sudo nautilus so that the file browser worked with root permissions but it accessed the locked HDD no problem a quick change from eth lo to eth0 (DHCP) and I'm busy copying the contents of 'Documents and Settings' to a network drive. I also used qparted to format the HDD on the dodgy keyboard one so that USB drivers are loaded at the pre-install stage from WinXP. So there I am using Linux to recover two Windows machines. Told you there was not much point to the post. -- Dick Turpin "Stand and deliver!"