Sorry, just got home to check my email.

Interesting ideas and I'll have to check them out. I do know once I boot the "bad" OSes the partitions are hosed. Even the "good" OSes can't see them afterwards. So the OSes seem to do something to the drive. It happens in the booting of the kernel, whatever it is. If I reinstall a "good" OS and re-partition the hard drive the OS boots just fine. I put in the "bad" OS boot disk and it seems to find the hard drive and the partitions OK. But once the install is done and the OS boots it complains and the partitions are lost. Really irritating.

If I can get this 300G IDE HD to work OK on a different system I'm going to forget the whole thing. Don't have time to play too much.