Below is my verbatin question to Computer Lady who kindly referred me to your listserv. I hope you can/will help me. ------------------------------------------------------------- I'm a senior citizen on disability without any med insurance for the two-year qualification period required by Medicare. Soooooooo... I can't afford to replace my old Dell Optiplex (1.96 Gb HDD)which I dearly love, love, love. I want you to stop laughing at my old machine now, Computer Lady! It performs basic functions but the hard drive is going to crash someday (hard drive failure notice pops up on every boot-up and has done so for more than a year). My roommate/landlady has an old computer she's not using. After I format her hard drive to clean it, how may I hook it up TO my present computer to use as a second hard drive? I do have one of those cables one can use computer-to-computer, or at least THINK that's what it is. It came with my old Disc Clone (tm) which also cannot be used to interface with my poor old Optiplex (but nicely copies all my CD's all by itself). Complicating factors: For some reason "My Computer" thinks there are drives A, C, D, E, & F when in fact there are only A, C, D, & E. FYI, I purchased the old girl used 4 years ago, and she'd obviously been part of a network before coming home with me. Phew! Will you help me, please? I just want to use my landlady's old computer as a back-up HDD til my Optiplex crashes and then use it as the primary. Her HDD won't fit as an actual replacement inside my computer. Joan Quarles Springfield, Virginia __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com The NOSPIN Group Promotions is now offering our special coffee mugs and mouse pads with the PCBUILD logo... at a great price!!! http://freepctech.com/goodies/promotions.shtml