Yet again, I managed to bring my system to a screeching halt. When this happens, everything stops and no recovery is possible. I have to unplug (and plug back in) the power supply to recover. The reset and power buttons do nothing. This all seems to stem from when I am using the floppy drive. This time I was creating a boot floppy from the SuSE8.1 CDROM This is what I did: cd /media/cdrecorder/boot/ dd if=bootdisk of=/dev/fd0u1440 It started creating the bootfloppy, and then the system crashes. The floppy disk is completely destroyed in the process. I cannot reformat the floppy in Linux or Windows once the system crashes while writing to the floppy. I have tested this same step on another computer running 8.1 and everything works fine. So... where can I look to try and pin down the problem? I have checked the various logs in /var/log and there is nothing in there... no errors, no indication of kernel panics, no hardware errors... nothing. Anyone have any suggestions what could be happening, or what I can look for? Can a failing floppy drive cause such a major system crash like this? C.