I've read several good suggestions. I would rank them this way: 1) Temporarily install your new drive in some other machine, connect it to your network, partition and format it, and copy your partitions over the network. The second machine would not have to be running Linux - you could use a speakup rescue disk, provided it could access the network. (It would not matter if it was an older version.) This way, you could move all the data without having to power your existing box down. 2) Temporarily connect another machine to your network and copy the partitions into free space there. Replace the drive, do a minimal install, and copy back. You would not have to open up the second machine (and it could be a notebook). However, you would have to do the minimal install and copy the data twice. 3) Power down, install the new drive as hdb in addition to the old one, reboot to Linux, partition and format the new drive, copy, then power down and remove the old drive. For the middle step, you could remove the old drive while leaving it connected electrically. In fact, that would let you give it a twist at power-up to help it spin up. Best of luck! - Jim Van Zandt