Well, I do know my other drives still will start up. I held option down and I eventually got into a utilities window where I could pick restoring from time machine or reinstalling; I closed this and found a button to choose a startup disk and all of my disks do work. I'm assuming the spotlight indexing problem with Lion either is temporary because I just installedor is specific to Lion because I've neverhad this problem when running Snow Leopard; I've always been able to access my startup disks from system preferences. -- Cheryl "Let the words of my mouth, and the meditation of my heart, be acceptable in thy sight, O LORD, my strength and my Redeemer." (Psalm 19:14: Bible KJV)