the good news : mounted as slave on Eide system after we removed it from scsi tray at meeting. (had to make slave jumper from aluminum foil) booted system using Slax disk http://slax.linux-live.org/ transfered all data from 2 partitions to usb flash drive http://www.kasercorp.com/ the bad news : the output from clamav ----------- SCAN SUMMARY ----------- Known viruses: 36088 Engine version: 0.86.1 Scanned directories: 669 Scanned files: 8245 Infected files: 19 Data scanned: 672.15 MB Time: 417.946 sec (6 m 57 s so the data is backed up on cd but 19 "in the wild" infections need to be removed.they were all on win98 partition so they don't bother any of my linux systems. __________________________________ Start your day with Yahoo! - Make it your home page! http://www.yahoo.com/r/hs Be sure to visit our web at www.ncolug.org