Thanks for the replies to my problem. Brian, I was thinking of trying to reinstall, haven't done that yet. And Harry, I was wondering about the drive's location maybe affecting things. I'm on a G4 450 DP, gig ethernet. The difference is it's not installed on the second drive, but the *third*, that I recently installed to make the move to X. It's a 250 gig ATA drive (not SATA), and I had to get a PCI controller card to be able to see/use all the space. (I know someone else was having problems with a SATA drive and controller card, on boot getting a question mark.) And the thing is, this new drive was seen and booted up fine in 10.2.8, so I don't know why there should be problems now. I'm not sure if I can go backwards, the old archived system can't be used to boot, and I don't want to step back anyway if I can help it. margaret