Thanks for all the suggestions. Here's what I've found out so far. First, the computer simply won't boot with only RAM/videocard/CDR drive; it keeps saying there is a bootdisk error (presumably because there are no discs attached). Second, I finally located some jumpers, and have checked all the settings on the two hard drives and the CDRW drive; they all show up correctly in the BIOS POST screen, so that seems fine. Third, I tried to swap out the video card -- you never know -- only to find that I don't have a spare PCIe video card to put in its place, and the video cards I do have aren't PCI. But one good thing came of that. When I put the video card back in and reseated everything, then, for one brief shining moment, the Gentoo install disc booted all the way up into the framebuffer (hi Tux!) until freezing at the "loading drivers etc. into memory" message. An immediate cold reboot, however, did not get as far as the framebuffer, That makes it likely that some piece of hardware is just flaky. Probably not the CDR drive, since I've had the same behaviour out of two drives and three cables. So now I'm guessing either the video card itself, the motherboard, or the power supply. Fourth, tried Knoppix, and, like SysRescueCD, it fails to load with the message that the data is corrupt. Odd, since, like SysRescue, it boots just fine on other equipment. From here I could try to run down a Really Old install disc, to see what happens. Or haunt a few electronics stores to find an old video card to swap out the current one. As for a longer shot, see if there is a BIOS upgrade in case there is some deep problem there. But most likely what I'll do is stick one of the hard drives in another computer, install a distro there, and see if the $@#!% computer will boot from a regular if lightweight linux on its master hard drive. (At some point this will no longer be fun. But not yet.) -- Peter King peter.king@utoronto.ca Department of Philosophy 170 St. George Street #521 The University of Toronto (416)-978-4951 ofc Toronto, ON M5R 2M8 CANADA http://individual.utoronto.ca/pking/ ========================================================================= GPG keyID 0x7587EC42 (2B14 A355 46BC 2A16 D0BC 36F5 1FE6 D32A 7587 EC42) gpg --keyserver pgp.mit.edu --recv-keys 7587EC42