Matthew Allen wrote: We are in violent agreement. If Aaron was running DSL or Dynebolic then he's have a completely operational system from which to look at the drive in question. Without this the ability to get the system booted, or the stability and/or availablility of any tool, is in question. I recently ran DSL, Dynebolic, Gentoo LiveCD AND Knoppix in Frys on all of the laptops I was considering until I found models that ran all 4 CDs. This gave me a lot of confidence that once I got the laptop home I'd be able to put Linux on it. It worked. I know watch DVD using Xine and Alsa just fine. These CDs are really valuable in times like Aaron is going through. I also started running SMART tools yesterday to learn about what they can do. Probably this is a good thing for others to look into also but I cannot really say yet. They are not difficult to use though and give a lot of interesting info. - Mark