Thanks John, okay, I manged to shut the hibernate mode off by pressing f10 during bootup. But everytime i use the windows 200 disk, when i switch the machine on, it won't start saying it's not a system disk?? I have a windows boot disk, so i tried that and gave me the 3 options, of support with a cd rom, support without a cd rom etc. At least then i get a command prompt. when i go to the c: it's basically creted a ram drive and won't show me anything else even though i know windows and office et al is on there! i then put the windows disk in, switch to the d: and i get the error saying the disk can't run from DOS mode?? any ideas?? it's really frustrating now! Thanks for your help...