my mother left her job and kept her laptop and gave it to me. the problem i have is that it is locked, she can not remember the password so despite attempts at getting on it it just informs me that the domain is no longer available. at first i wasnt to bothered, decided to get a new hdd off ebay, found a 60g ipod hard drive witch are exactly the same. loaded xp on to it but when it cam to the midway restart it went back to the begining of the load up process which confused me even more.................then i brought an hdd adaptor which would allow me to plug it into my desk top but this meant unplugging my dvd drive on desktop meaning i couldnt load anything on to it so the reslut is i am now trying to access again through the old hdd. current o/s is NT and its on a portege r100 which i belive also means i need specific (read expensive) disc drive, cheers in advance...................tocalosh