thanks guys, i have home, so i'm not sure if that would've worked the same or not? anyway, there's no disc, it's on a seperate partition of the hd which i couldn't access. not that big a deal putting in the second hd, exept that there's no space for it, so it's just hanging out the side. unfortuneately, it didn't work out like i thought it would. the first thing that happend on startup was an hour of rewriting files on the old drive. still don't know what that was all about. also no drivers! finaly found the one for the modem. still need to find the monitor one, the screen is just TOO big. i think most of the bigger apps are still there and it looks like i saved all my shows. can't tell for sure, no winamp or frontend. i didn't want to spend the weekend messing w/ this crap, but it could've been a lot longer. think i'll try and keep things a little cleaner from now on.
thanks again for the suggestions
kirk