Thanks to the help on this list I now have my Maxtor 40 gig drive on as a slave. I plan on copying all the cds to the hard drive and do a hard drive installation ( much faster than my old 2 speed cdrom). I orginally planned on 2 partitians on the extra drive, one primary at 1000 cylinders and a secondary with the remaining 3982 cylinders. Orginally I was only planning to use the 40 gig drive for only for storage, but now I am thinking I may be able to install SuSE 7.0 on the first partition after I copy the contents of all the cds to the extended partition. Will this work or is there a better way to do it, I would like to keep SuSe 6.3 on my primary drive, and install SuSE 7.0 on the slave if possible ( using a boot manager which is already installed) rather than overwriting my SuSE 6.3 install that works well ( hate to fix something that works but do want to see the latest from SuSE). Any suggestions? So far I have not done anything to the slave drive other than format it, now is the time to change the partitions befroe I install anything on it. thanks in advance, joe