sorry Cresent...I don't think you can do that on a proprietary system like a Compaq. The restore disk looks to those drives to do what it needs to do...there is a very small partition that needs to be there for the restore disk. I used to have one. If you can only use the restore disk for a format (in other words, you don't have a Windows 9x disk), than you can't touch it. :( Laurie