http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net/ There was some talk tonight about hard drive failures. I couldn't remember the name of the tool set I had used to solve some long standing flakiness that came down to small errors beginning to show up on some older drives. I spent countless hours blaming one thing and another before finally looking at the hardware. I tossed four old drives after I learnt some of my way around this software. As a consequence the software I was so frustrated with seems to magically have been transformed into usefulness on the new drives.. Hope this helps someone out Thanks Bill for a good presentation tonight. Ian