begin Jon Clausen's quote: | Faulty controller? | Cable? | | Which mobo? it's an asus p4b533; there was brief mention of it on the kernel mailing list. | Unfortunate as it is, this being her first impression and all, I'm | leaning towards hw-error. 'Cause if it's not the drive(s), and not | the OS, then... i agree. problem is, she's a physician and mother and has neither time nor inclination to go chasing around all that much replacing things so that an operating system her brother recommends will merely install. problem was exacerbated when she popped in a windows cd and it installed uneventfully. which means that her first impression will most likely also be her last impression, and should the subject ever arise i'm sure she'll describe her hellish day with linux. very sad, but i do not know much of a way of countering her decision. linux is more secure? "well, yes, if it doesn't even install and therefore the drive is blank, it's certainly secure." linux doesn't suffer from the kinds of infections that have plagued your windows use. "right. linux doesn't need a virus to make it stop working -- it does it on its own." and so on. i'm sure if i'd been there instead of 1,000 miles away, i'd have been able to come up with a way of solving the problem. but it does make you wonder how many such experiences there are out there that we*don't* know about. -- dep http://www.linuxandmain.com -- outside the box, barely within the envelope, and no animated paperclip anywhere.