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In a few careless moves i may have fouled up my 701CS thinkpad harddisk (710 mb) partitioning so badly that i may have to send the disk back to IBM for repair. I'm wondering whether anyone recognizes enough about what's going on to advise me on the next step. I've been happily running linux and dos/windows 3.1 on the machine for quite a while, with little glitches here and there to keep me occupied. Upon struggling to get a new iomega zip drive recognized by the dos/win side, i finally decided to migrate to Win95 for plug n play. (After backing stuff up to a zip disk from the linux side - linux recognized the zip drive out of the box, incidentally.) I forged ahead with the win95 preparations, and recklessly (ab)used fdisk. I first removed the DOS partition - dumb shortcut - and then under linux fdisk, also removed the OS/2 boot partition - no good reason, sigh. I put to the DOS partition back so it encompassed the old OS/2 boot and DOS partitions. In the process i made the machine so it cannot be booted while the hardisk is in the machine. Even when trying to boot from the floppy drive, the machine will do the memory check and then freeze with the number 84 in the bottom of the screen. It will boot to the floppy if the harddisk is displaced from the machine. I'm afraid i know what's happening. It has something to do with the harddisk password - i guess it was somewhere on the parts of the disk i changed around (the purported risks of fooling with non-dos fdisk?). Which could mean that the machine is specifically designed to prohibit booting up with this disk, due to a perceived password mismatch - or at least, mistrust of perceived corruption of secure territory. So i guess my questions are: - Is there any way for me to reset the harddisk partition - something i can do to get it online, so i can eg do an 'fdisk /mbr'? - Failing that, should i call ibm tech support and pay the $35 to talk to the OS group (i bought the machine 1.5 years ago, but the os is only covered for 60 days, and then not if you're messing with a foreign os...), supposing that they can instruct me to recover the disk? - Or should i simply arrange to pay the $170 to send the disk back to IBM and have them reinstall the original OS? Thanks for listening to my foolish exploits. I welcome any constructive clues! Ken Manheimer klm@cnri.reston.va.us 703 620-8990 x268