Thks Dave. Will give your suggestion a go and see if it works. Does that mean from the CD, DMA is off?

Don't know if this matters but my hds are connected as follows:-

hda1(Hitachi DeskStar 80GB) - Windows 98 partitioned using the new FDisk as old one does not support more than 60GB
hda2 - Knoppix 4
hdb1,2,3,4,5 (IBM Deststar 40GB) - various Linux (Redhat, Knoppix3...)
hdc1 (Seagate 20GB) - Win VFAT32 (LBA) for data storage
hdc3 - ext3 for data storage

I think it has to do with the Seagate drive.