Paul Taylor wrote:

Thanks Tony, I wasn't going to use /tmp as I knew it was not a good idea but I didn't realise that it is wiped on each reboot. The article looks just the ticket. My problem to some extent is that I have all of my ide channels in use so I might have to unplug the cd drive to do this. That should be okay for a bit though?

Absolutely. You shouldn't need to access the CD drive during the course of the copying, so I wouldn't anticipate any problems in this respect. Tony