Thanks John, I've (quickly) gone through your references and the 'Emergency Win 98 Boot Disc' has some promise.

Generally I can muddle through to create partitions and format the drive, but getting to the point where the system recognises that a CD-ROM exists is very problematic.

Having written last night that I thought I had a smooth process in place, I started out on a HP Celeron 350 Meg (ish) machine which refused to open my 'stsndard' DOS Setup Disc. I ended up using a FreeDos Image disc to get the CD-ROM working only to find that Win98 didn't take kindly to FreeDOS, BUT Win 2000 would at least self boot. After 3 hours of tedium I got to bed at 1:00 am in a slightly grumpy mood, but at least I'd configured one more PC

As an Irish friend once told me - referring to the Irish people - "They can take away our happiness, but they can't take away our misery".

Joyfully,
John

PS There are probably lots of others but I've found that BELARC ADVISOR is a nifty piece of Windows Freeware to provide a very comprehensive stocktake of all your installed hardware and software. I've no idea where I found it but suspect that it's an easy Google task.