When I boot the computer with the arch hard drive in it, the system waits until I hit enter to start talking. Not a problem since it does talk but only for a few seconds then espeak turns off. If I log in very quickly, I get a root prompt. If I wait for a few seconds after that then espeak goes off again. I did save the state of the sound card with alsactl before rebooting the system too. I followed instructions for syslinux and changed the lines in syslinux.cfg to point at /sda1 rather than sda3 as is the default too which is why the system comes up as far as it now does. Does syslinux run some kind of splash screen or screen saver by default once it starts up? If so I may need to turn that off and then everything should be working correctly. If what I read in syslinux.cfg is correct users of the beginner's guide ought to be told to link or copy one of those files from /boot/lib/syslinux into the /boot/syslinux directory I didn't do that and that may be the cause for all of what is breaking now. The syslinux-update command is mentioned twice and the first time it's mentioned in the section on syslinux, it's mentioned too early since the edits to /boot/syslinux/syslinux.cfg need to happen before the syslinux-update command gets run unless that syslinux-update command actually needs to be run twice for some reason. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- jude <jdashiel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> Adobe fiend for failing to Flash