I hope this'll be a lesson in the unreliability of wild guessing. No laptop was treated like a football. No strange disk formats were being used. No floppy disks and/or drives were faulty. No BIOSes had relevant bugs. Here's what the actual problem turned out to be. The mkbd script in BRLTTY's Bootdisks subdirectory rewrites the syslinux.cfg file. It does this by creating the new copy of the file in a temporary Linux file called cfg, and then replacing syslinux.cfg with the new content. The fix was to change "mv -f cfg mnt1/syslinux.cfg" to "cp cfg mnt1/syslinux.cfg". This change will be in BRLTTY 3.1. If you need to make it before then, it's on line 19 of the Bootdisks/mkbd script. Theoretically, this change (using "cp" instead of "mv -f") shouldn't make any difference. The fact that it does must mean that syslinux is defficient in the way that it's searching the FAT for vmlinuz. The original "mv" command has the potential to move things around whereas the new "cp" command ensures that the layout of the FAT isn't altered. Once again: The big lesson here is that, as is usually the case, each problem needs and deserves a proper analysis rather than a zillion guesses. -- Dave Mielke | 2213 Fox Crescent | I believe that the Bible is the Phone: 1-613-726-0014 | Ottawa, Ontario | Word of God. Please contact me EMail: dave@mielke.cc | Canada K2A 1H7 | if you're concerned about Hell. http://familyradio.com