Well, believe it or not, it may be that this error was being thrown out by my CDRom drive (a Takaya 12x from 1997...) I swapped it with an old (1997) NEC, and it would boot Linux. However, I have had no joy.... The install has started (a number of times) but will eventually die on either the CDROM drive "not ready" or an I/O error on the hard drive. Of note - got one of the Cendyne (brandy-new) 48x CDRW's that are currently free after rebate at Office Max. This will boot Linux, but then asks if I want to do FTP, NFS, Local CD, Local hard drive install - because after booting from the CD, it seems to lose it's mind and can't find the CD in the reader!! Same thing with two different physical CD's. Now with the old NEC in there, it starts o.k., partitions the drive, and then while installing packages (different packages each of 3 times) the hard drive goes "not ready" (sorry, didn't get the exact error message written down - it was late when I gave up last night). D'ya think I may need to start back a little? What I did was partition my 120G drive (using Maxtor tools) thus; 12 gig NTFS 12 gig FAT32 left the rest empty (to format with Linux) Since then, I have deleted the 12 gig FAT32 partition, and installed XP-Pro on the NTFS partition. When in Linux install, I have tried to allow "automatic" partition, but never works. Manually, I have tried a couple of things such as: 6 gig / 256 meg /boot rest /home, 2 gig /home, etc. Format goes o.k., although I didn't take the time to "check for bad blocks".... Then, like I said, install dies at various packages, and on one of the alternate consoles I see /hda spewing errors.... Any other thoughts off hand? Currently d'loading Mandrake 9.1 to try...really not locked on RedHat, just wanting to to a MythTV in the box... Thanks - -- Chris Hoelscher