Hi, My Zip drive is one of the spangly new USB ones, (It's a laptop, and you can't get a parallel one for love nor money :) I also own a newly purchased CD-Writer 20x write, (but I can only squeeze 12x due to the bandwith restrictions over USB) I've got plenty of CD's, I even backed up a chunk of stuff, but I was in the process of collating the info prior to burning it off when it died, (rather essential when your Poser4 dir is around 5Gb :) not to mention my expanding sims dir too... So, all in all a bit of a bugger! :) Though I think I may have to fire up the writer tonight, and burn the contents of my Zips to CD, then I can use the Zips to recover my drive piece meal. It'll take a while, (90 mins for each scan, prior to recovery) then the laborious task for transfering it all to disk, thence to CD. Then I think it's time to bite the bullet and install either Xp or win2K. Anyone got any opionions as to which is better for poser? later jb