i have just made disk into 5 parts...
6, 6, 6, 6 & 21gig parts...
the result of this is that this is NOT an issue regarding number of parts on the disk, all was working OK in dos and windows (no ms dos compatabily issues) for now with the last part bigger than 13gig (i'd imagine i'd probably get prob if i wrote more than 8gigs to this 21gig partition causing it to access the last >32gb part of the disk)

The next thing i shall try is 1 40gig part and 1 5gig part and in theory this should give me problems, this will tell us for sure hopefully what is going on.

i just checked following mosaics instructions and NO Q243450 ain't listed on mine either under win98se or win98. i'll try installing it after these few experiments.

I know what u mean about the lack of info for my PC, this is quite appalling for such a major manifacure init.

Thank you all for sticking with me, your help has been brilliant.

------------------
HP Pavilion 8730uk with Athlon 850mhz, 512mb RAM, TNT2 Pro 32mb, SB Live 1024, LG CED-8083b CD-RW, Samsung SD-612 DVD-ROM, Quantum 30gb lct15-30 & Western Digital 45gb WD450AA HDD & Win98fe.