Well, it could be that the laptop floppy has a different format; in fact, just this evening it was insisting I was putting in some floppies with vfat. However, the Redhat disks aren't working on either machine and they were done on the desktop. so I don't think that's the problem with the Redhat floppies. It might, however, explain why the debian floppies, both standard and brltty-modified, work on my desktop but not on my laptop. I'll go looking for the disk utilities, as I do have a DOS partition. Cheryl