Mike, your suggestion is well taken. I'm running W2k now and I want to change hard drive because I think this one is going bad. (This will be another query). I want to boot outside of the hard drive so that I can copy all of my old info to the new hard drive. I can make the new a slave, but there are files that are being used and can't be accessed when I boot up W2k. (I was also thinking that if I found a way to do this I could always use this technique to back up an existing drive periodically for security). When I went to do as suggested: control panel/add-remove programs/startup disk/create disk...." I couldn't find 'startup disk' to create a boot disk. I think this is true for W98 not in W2K. The reason I wanted to create from my HD is that I wanted the operating system boot using a registry on a floppy or CD that would enable me to use my other utilities already installed. Any other ideas?