On Aug 3, 2006, at 2:14, Kay Diederichs wrote: > This disk is bad, as can be seen from [snip] OK, that's actually good news. The only reason I was doubting it was the disk was that this is the second disk that had problems, although the problems with the first disk may have been something completely different (but that was also with a different Linux distribution). I will send this disk back to Maxtor after running the Maxtor utility. Thanks for all your help. It was a great learning experience and I was able to recover all the critical data. The system is back up and running with a spare drive while I wait for the replacement to arrive. Alfred