aken_aton; One possible work around is to get a smallish (say 20 gig) HDD and install XP on it, do all the registration jiggery pokery. Put the 120gig drive on the same ribbon as a slave drive. XP should recognize the HDD as existing in Device Manager. If it does, then check the attributes on that slave drive and tell windows that it is a removable drive. Doing this causes windows to treat it as a floppy or a zip disk; all it is concerned with then are the partition tables and formatting. It ignores the boot sector. You -should- be able to read your data then.