I did not choose to encrypt the persistant partition when I made it. I will try the solutions you so kindly provided. I thank you for your time and effort. Its not often people will help to this extent. I did a backup early this morning and have all vital data on cd's and am resigned to reinstall...wouldnt be the first time lol

btw, what would be wrong in going into qparted and deleting the hda1 since hda2 is an ext3 partition and a swap partition is already established?

thanks again

helios