update: on thursday night, my powerbooks original toshiba hd died. smartreporter kicked in and said that i was about to have a hardware failure and that i'd better back up…! i was luckily able to clone my drive completely (my last backup was 3 days old) and on friday i went and bought myself a hitachi 100gb 7200rpm drive. i re-installed everything over the week-end and now everything is back to normal. changing the hard drive of the 17" was REALLY easy, it took me about 20min (thanks to www.pbfixit.com and their great tutorials). on my 12" it had taken me 4 hours… kind regards alexandre :: 17" 1.5ghz powerbook / 1.5gb / 80gb / X.4.4 ::