a nephew who knows even less about computers than i do brought me his toshiba tecra (500cs) because it wouldn't boot. he didn't have a recovery disk. i tried to boot with my win98 recovery disk and the normal ramdisk was set up in memory. there was a message that the partition table couldn't be read on the fixed drive (implication - the fixed drive was recognised?). when i tried to redefine the partition through fdisk, fdisk gave a message that there was no hard drive. this tecra also has a removable cd-rom drive and this was fitted into a special slot. this too was not recognised by the system at boot up time. can anyone throw some light on what is happening? words of advice on what might be done to get the system up and goin would be greatly appreciated. ______________________________________________________ Arjun Puri 123India.com - India's Premier Portal Get your Free Email Account at http://www.123india.com Arjun Puri ______________________________________________________ 123India.com - India's Premier Portal Get your Free Email Account at http://www.123india.com PCBUILD mailing list is brought to you by: The NOSPIN Group http://nospin.com - http://nospin.org