thanks all for the help on my 2 gateways issue. still playing with it. i read the raid-howto, and i hv setup a raid 1 for hda and hdc harddisk. the hda is ext2 the hdc is a fd filetype. if my hda (boot disk) fails, can i boot up from a mini bootable floppy and mount the hdc partition and recover the data? i tried that, but it keeps complaining filetype error when i try to mount the hdc partition. David