I had some help from the group a little while ago when I was trying to get my Thinkpad to boot from an external (USB/IDE) drive and, with various peoples' help I finally suceeded. Now I'm trying to do the same thing with a drive from another computer. I'm part way there but during boot I see: pivot_root: No such file or directory /sbin/init: 431: cannot open dev/console: No such file kernel panic: Attempted to kill init! Then the process proceeds with a few more lines about USB and SCSI until: Attached scsi disk sda at scsi1, ... etc Attached scsi generic sg1 at scsi1, ... etc and here it stops. I don't remember seeing these errors on my previous attempt. Any suggestions (in the nicest possible way of course) would be appreciated. Barry Samuels http://www.beenthere-donethat.org.uk The Unofficial Guide to Great Britain