Kerry - Your wager was well taken. It turns out Linux was able to repair any file system damage my clumsiness caused and I appear to have lost nothing. At least nothing has turned up missing so far and I get no bootup errors. Here is my progress report, complete with an admission of stupidity... I took my system into the hardware guys yesterday fully prepared to go for a new motherboard with a serious processor, and a couple of hours later they phoned me with the worst possible news... namely, that there was nothing detectably wrong with my motherboard or power supply, and that as far as they could determine the problem was a defective doubletalk PC internal card... And they proved it to me over the phone. When my failure occured last Friday, I too thought it might be a failed speech card, and my first attempt at diagnosis was to move the card from machine A to machine B, where it worked okay. So I put it back in machine A and continued to try everything else I could think of - nothing would make it complete the bootup process. Now I have a DTPC that works in one machine and not in another. I talked to Randy Carlstrom who has trouble believing that, and does not advise a ROM upgrade. His only suggestion is to clean the contacts and doublecheck the board seating, but those are not problems. Where I am at the moment is that the DTPC from machine A is now happily talking in machine B, and the board that used to be in B is now in A and is also happily talking. I booted into Linux and the system came up just fine. Sorry to have panicked everybody with a false alarm, but your advice was very helpful and supportive anyway, and I do plan to proceed to a new processor and more memory plus a distro upgrade. I really feel stupid, but I am not in as bad a situation as I feared. Chuck My web site is http://www.mhonline.net/~chuckh Q: How does a single woman in New York get rid of cockroaches? A: She asks them for a commitment.
