Thanks for this Done the detective thing and started with a pc box I knew worked and replaced individual bits and pieces Upshot is the HD is dead (it makes a awful ticking noise when trying to boot) That's not to surprising given all the shaking we had in Christchurch and it makes me wonder how many other of my hard drives will eventually fail too - most of them being 5 years or older . . . . . . Luckily for me - I had nothing important on the failed HD!! Who has tried and run Ubuntu from a USB HD - anything bigger then say 250MB?? Is there a slowness due to transfer rates compared to say a 'normal' HD???? I may want to think about a solid state HD if that can work better (no moving parts eh ;) ) Cheers Reinhold <div class="gmail_quote"><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"> 1. missing hard drive (Papabear aka Reinhold) 2. Re: missing hard drive (Ru) 3. Re: missing hard drive (Michael Hudson-Doyle) Hello, When you turn on your computer can you hear your Harddrive spin up at all ? You can try setting your bios to defaults Also if you can try unplugging your Harddrive and then plugging it in again. Sounds like a hardware problem, unfortunately. Might be a loose cable, might be a dead drive or controller or something... Cheers, mwh </blockquote></div>