Yes, that's possible, though not especially desirable since it would rule out ever getting back the fixed-up version of Vista that was on the old partition. I spent a fair amount of time getting it running as right as it could and installed a lot of stuff - which would all be down the tubes if I just "restore" using the ROM-and-hidden-partition system that's built in. So I'm hoping for a reasonably quick fix with another OS - with many goodies builtin - that will give me time to figure out what happened.

Slipstreaming had been on my agenda for a while, but it's not as easy as it looked on first blush. You have to extract the desired stuff from a self-installing "driver" file - once you find the right one - to integrate it in to the new ISO. Since it only wants to do its thing on the system with that hardware... Catch 22, as they say.

And floppies are the only mechanism that M$oft allows for driver install during the OS-installation process, AFAICT. In fact, it won't even look at the CD drive, let alone the hd. FAT32 - this is the one-and-only non-NTFS file system that M$oft will allow XP to install on, AFAIK.

Krishna