graviton6

thanks - i'll give it a shot.

the OS is currently XP - r u suggesting installing another instance of xp in another folder or NT in another folder?

my acer TM 420 crashed and caused some damage to the c: drive it would appear. i'm trying to reboot via the vendor supplied cd-rom; booting from this cd doesn't grant access to the 'recovery console' but to some acer specific application which allows xp to be re-installed. problem is - even after xp is reinstalled, the boot sequence hangs on a driver file agp440.sys which i believe is used by the ATI graphics board (which i believe is damaged and is the cause of the crash). anyway, i can get into dos mode and get onto the c: drive but running 'chkdsk' returns 'command not found' etc. as a result of the crash, the C:\ directory is screwed up - it contains no 'visible' files. since even 'chkdsk' doesn't work, looks like some basic files are missing or corrupt. ideas as to how to get chkdsk to work? thanks.