This is a purely theoretical question. Yesterday I re-installed Windows XP on /dev/sda1 on my laptop (I'd used dd to try to copy Windows from a smaller partition, and while this booted it had a number of bizarre error). Anyway, this removed grub from the MBR, so I used Knoppix to re-install grub, which I did without problem by running grub-install --root-directory=/mnt/sda5 /dev/sda I was surprised how long this took - over 10 minutes on a ThinkPad T43 (800MHz with 512MB RAM). Admittedly the new disk is quite large, 120GB, but what exactly is grub-install doing? But that isn't my question. My first attempt to re-install grub was to mount /dev/sda5 as /mnt/sda5 and then run "chroot /mnt/sda5". What puzzled me is that after this /dev/sda was not found. Why is this? Does one have to run something like udevd after chroot now? -- Timothy Murphy e-mail (<80k only): tim /at/ birdsnest.maths.tcd.ie tel: +353-86-2336090, +353-1-2842366 s-mail: School of Mat00hematics, Trinity College, Dublin 2, Ireland