well I got those 2 emails telling me how to get into my windows drive but both of your approaches didn't work. I reinstalled linux somewhat successfully (for the 3rd time!) but get a few warnings about the wrong kernel ver in system.map and an error with mounting somewhere when booting. I don't know if loadlin is doing it since that was the first time I've used it. Anyway. How do I mount my FAT32X and FAT16B drives onto linux? Is vfat used for FAT32 and msdos used for FAT16? I know the commands are: mkdir /mnt/windows and /mnt/ddrive mount -t vfat /dev/hda1 /mnt/windows and mount -t msdos(i'm assuming for fat16) /dev/hda5 /mnt/ddrive I've tried both in the console as root and it says unknown file system or something like that. can someone please tell me what I have to do to get linux to support FAT16 and FAT32? Or just FAT32. I can convert my other drive if I find out FAT32 is better than FAT16. ok, one last side-question: of the FAT16 and FAT32 file systems, which is superior in file read/write/transfer speed and efficiency? I purposely created another 2 gig FAT16 partition (faster than a 13 gig FAT32 partition) to hold all the stuff I want to host with linux. I'm under the impression that the smaller a partition is the faster and more efficient it becomes, and I feel this would be very important if I'm hosting and files are constantly being created/written/removed. please correct me if I'm wrong.