I apologise for the following longish message which, possibly, may belong in the off-topic list... but also doesn't belong there.... Please bear with me.. Back last May I bought 2 brand new, "matched", Seagate 160GB HDs. There was no way I could install 11.2 MS-anything or RC-anything on one of them. It would *"install"* but at the first boot grub could not find the operating system. Doing some testing on the HD came up with contrary results: one set of tools showed that there was nothing wrong with the HD (using Seagate's SeaTools) but then using the Windows Scandisk from a bootable floppy showed that there were bad sectors at the start of the HD. OK, I put this HD away, and now the shop were I bought it will replace the HD when I take it back. Fine. However, the second Seagate appears to be OK, and I used it for my wife's computer last weekend to install 11.2. All went well, and she now has 11.2. *But*, it takes forever for 11.2 to boot on her machine :-( . And after it does, the "HD in use" light remains ON. When I then reboot and check the file system (default, ext4), using "e2fsck -p /dev/sda1", shows that there is no problem with the file system, the "HD in use" light stops being on for the rest of the day while the computer is in use. My concern now is: is there a problem with *this* Seagate HD which should also be replaced by the shop or is there something else which needs to be done to stop the "HD in use" light showing? The second hassle. A couple of weeks ago, when I was interstate, I bought a couple of 500GB Western Digital HDs. These are now the ones which have 11.2 installed on them, and they are working fine... with a possible qualification. The qualification is that I installed XP SP2 to start with, before installing oS 11.2, and created my "usual" ntfs partitions on both HDs. No drama here. However, I also have an external 500GB Maxtor USB drive - factory formatted in ntfs- which I use for backing-up files both from both Linux and 'old' installation/s of XP (residing on other set/s of HDs). The problem - which has me totally bamboozled - is that I can copy, using mc (midnight commander), files from the 'old' installation/s of XP to the external USB and then can copy using mc from the external Maxtor to the partitions on the new installation of XP.... *BUT* I am unable to copy the same files from external USB Maxtor to the new XP installation using anything from within the newly installed XP :-( : there is a "pretend" copy of the first couple of files but then the whole process slows to ~20kb/s, and in the final result NOTHING has been copied- the file name/s contain/s 0 bytes. The error message in XP is, if I recall correctly, is along the lines of, "cannot write to the destination <disk/directory>" or similar. I have done chkdsk <X>: /f on all of the partitions while in XP and all partitions (including the external Maxtor) have no errors Sorry about asking about this here, but if you can throw some light on this hassle of mine I'd be most grateful. BC -- I work to live not live to work. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org