I think I'm gonna try U10, will have to order one though so will take a bit of time. the xtide was a bust, it will boot with it, it comes up with the xtide BIOS, booting to the floppy from that produces the same result of the system hanging on read, and booting from the xtide... well, I tried 15 different IDE HDDs ranging from 40MB to 160GB and it didn't recognise even ONE of them! the ONLY IDE device I could get it to recognise was a 128MB DOM (which happened to have XP embedded on it so it wasn't going to boot as is) only problem is, I can't format it, while it was the ONLY IDE device recognised by the xtide, the xtide was the only thing to recognise the disk! all other IDE interfaces on any machine ranging from a 486 to a core 2 duo just see nothing when its connected! I can see the device on my 5170 in the xtide and fdisk sees one dos partition of 3MB and one non-dos partition of 120MB but since fdisk can't remove a non-dos partition I can't do anything with it. if I DO try booting from it on the 5160 I get the message "missing operating system" which is obviously true but I'm not sure if this says anything, as its either from the xtide BIOS, the 5160 BIOS or the boot sector of the disk, if the message IS from the boot sector, maybe that says something about what's working? if it can at least read a boot sector from a fixed disk?