Actually it doesn't rule that out at all. Often times a person has some cluster problems. Then they either have them marked by scan disk or do a format. Then the drive has more clusters go bad. Then more clusters go bad. Before long major chunks of the drive are gone. This is actually quite frequent. If a person has a bad cluster marked I always recomend running a through scan on the drive every week for a month. Often the first couple are the warning of the drives impending failure. Like I have said on list, I have seen this kind of thing caused by something on the motherboard only once or twice. It is so rare that I never go to that until all other possibilities are investigated. If he was running windows I could give him information on finding where in the boot process the problem was occuring. (By causing the system to log the boots.) I am sure the same can be done in Linux, but don't know how or how to prevent overwriting so you can go and look later. ======= Kirk Wood Cpt.Kirk at 1tree.net The mind is like a parachute; it works much better when open. If your too open minded, your brains will fall out.
