I've added a second IDE card to my system on the PCI bus, and added a small HDD on the Primary Master port for that IDE card. This drive shows up using the Gparted live CD as /dev/hde Which sounds about right. The other drives show up as /dev/hda (Primary Master) and /dev/hdc (Secondary Master). /dev/hdb is an empty removable drive caddy (Primary Slave) and /dev/hdd (Seconday Slave) is the DVD-RW drive. So I now have a maximum of 8 IDE ports - 4 on the IDE controller built into the motherboard (which BTW are all A-OK), and 4 on the IDE-PCI addon card. Vivard on the Ultimate Boot CD recognises the /dev/hde drive, as being on the PCI controller. I was also able to format the 2GB Samsung drive on /dev/hde as linux-swap using Gparted. The largest spare drive I have is ~7 GB, which might be enough for a linux-swap partition, and a /var/log partition. The idea is to have any logging and other intensive disk I/O on a spare disk drive, so as not wake up the main hard drive with the Linux root partition on it. I just want to write any 'disposable data' to a spare hard disk drive, and keep this seperated from stuff on my main root partition/linux installation. Kind Regards, Keith Roberts -- In theory, theory and practice are the same; in practice they are not. This email was sent from my laptop with Centos 5.5