slaps hand against forehead

Of course. I wasn't thinking. I haven't tried the BIOS (F2 it is--this is a Dell), but as you also note, it probably would have noticed it was there if there wasn't something wrong with the drive. I'll take a look later once the kids are off the machine. We've rounded up the last of the drivers we noticed were missing (I had to download the audio driver and our machine had an upgraded video card that I had to find the driver for--the disks supplied with the computer didn't seem to have that second one. I probably could have found the audio driver but most times it is easier to find it online than it is to poke through a stack of CDs looking at the directories. We have them if we need them.)

Rain most of the day today, so they've been inside giving the new drive a good workout. It looks fine at this point.

Richard, I have been poking around in my old email files (saved to a CD ages ago) just out of curiosity. I used Pegasus for years, so these are the old directories and files with long strings of email with their file attachments. I'm going to make myself a sub directory in my current Pegasus configuration and move a couple of these old files into it just to see if it can open them. Have you tried that? Make a new directory, put something in it to see how it behaves, then coordinate your transfer to work with that directory. This doesn't have anything to do with compressing files, just moving them.

SRS