Hello Sandy, Daniel, Patrick, Carlos, Teruel, James, Bandi... :-) thank you very much for your hints. Meanwhile I have downloaded several "live CD's and tried with them what I was able to, till now with no success. Nothing really important has been lost, so I will not invest too much work on that topic. I don't now what happened. Somehow it looks as just the whole disk is rotten. The BIOS shows it, but fdisk, gparted etc. show a 7.something GB disk, what in fact was a 20 GB disk. It doesn't find /dev/hda1 nor /dev/hda2 and parted says, it can't work with a partition outside of the disk... I was just hoping there was a tool which I can download, burn on a CD, boot with it and save the data on a floppy without the need of knowing/thinking so much :-) (In my early computer days, on NCR systems, we had a "dump"-command and it just printed out the raw contents of a disk in hexadecimal form, even from an unmounted disk, if I remember correctly. Well, it was a 40 MB (yes, "MB" not "GB"!) disk, so probably not quite the same as nowadays...) Anyway: thanks a lot for the try. Daniel -- Daniel Bauer photographer Basel Switzerland professional photography: http://www.daniel-bauer.com Madagascar special: http://www.sanic.ch -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org