Thnaks to martin and the others who have given me hints on this. I reinstalled on a fresh 69 dollar Hard Drive , and mounted the original drive as dev/hdb6 using mount -t auto x y (forget the other two thingies) This allowed me to copy the data to the "new HD. I think disconnected the original so I can play with it some more when I can be alert... . I am behind in other stuff because of the problem, but with the computer running and my data accessible (and in theory backed up on the non-working drive :) ) I did print out your email martin, The New install allows my printer to work, the old install never did! I will use that when I go hard drive Splunking.