Just to wrap this up. My machine finally totally froze at the apple grey screen or repeatedly gave me the multilanguage screen of death. So I phoned the Apple people. The rep in Austin..didn't like me calling it the Multilanguage screen of Death :-) Before I phone though I ran Tech Tool. What crap it is!!!!!!!!!! It ran for 18 hours never did finish repairing the volumes. So..the Apple rep. I phone and this is what we go through. boot from restore disk. Won't do it. Power down everything. all plug in's usb etc unplugged. lift key board hard reset the pram with some weird key combination reset the firmware. now reboot with restore disks It works YEAH!!!! run the disk utility twice fixes most stuff but not all Second run It fixes things Finally boot back into my regular volumes Yeah life is back to normal. If you were following this thread thought you might want to know. tim tim.molnar Digital Tao http://www.digitaltao.ca Victoria: 250.721.3224 (currently) Regina: 306.585.3666 Cell: 250.661.6426 tam at em.ca