well it certainly wasn't hanging by a thread, of stuff that had happened on it since I bought it, all that I remember going wrong before was one or two circular references on my fat32 partitions, which dosfsck fixed. I did the tohd thing, and then when i tried to run knoppix from the hd, it would give something like seek error(etc etc) :41009, over and again then reset(0) or something like that and then repeat itself whenever it was trying to read from the hd. I don't have any info with me (on a friends comp). Then I went and booted my red hat 9, and it did the same thing when trying to load kde, tried booting windows and it would just freeze as soon as grub chainloaded, and errors were just popping up everywhere I tried to access the hd, on every partition. As to trying to fdisk it etc, I tried that, running the knoppix cd and using fdisk, which wouldn't even read it, qtparted which crashed consistently, and parted which worked best but didn't fix it at all. I even tried a 5 hour dos format from a recovery disk, where it said "trying to fix allocation unit 5009" up to about allocation unit 10000000 or such, and it didn't do a single good thing. Still if it works ok for you, perhaps it was a fault in the copying of the cd, I didn't do any md5 checks or anything. Oh and also, no NTFS, I much prefere 98 to all these new fangled XP's, 2000s, and what not. Ah well, all this said, and the end of the day, the most important thing is that Jesus loves you, died for you, rose again and wants a relationship with you and all you need to do is invite him into your life. God bless