well looks like you where spot on so far super. installed vista ulitamte on a new 400GB HD, not that i needed so much but it was sooo cheap!, and all is working fine. now i'm just trying to get all the important stuff of the other drive. and thankfully all is going well so far, haven't lost anything. i'll get everything i need and then formatt the drive and see if there is a problem or if i can still keep using the drive to store data. thanks dunedin as well

p.s: Vista gets a lot of stick, as M$ always do, but on the whole i think they have done a great job. so far evything is so much smoother and easier in general and it's the little things that make a big difference. like being able to see the file transfer speeds when copying from other drives etc. only problem is it takes up a ton of memory. i was surprised how good XP xould run on 1GB of PC-6400 but i thing another is needed for vista.

cheers..