Thanx for the feedback, crobert. If we are looking at some type of manufacturer information that has been imprinted onto the HDD, then would it harm the HDD if that part of the HDD was overriden? I am not seeing the importance of the need to must-have manufacturer info., maybe someone can explain that to me. BTW, a friend of mine has suggested that I might be looking at the master boot record (MBR) if I am indeed looking at the first 128 bytes. This prompted me to break out my UNIX System Admin. handbook. I am still talking about PC and Windows, so bear with me for a minute. This is an excerpt from the text describing the PC boot process: "...once your machine has figured out what device to boot from, it will try to load the first 512 bytes of the disk. This 512-byte segment is known as the Master Boot Record or MBR. The MBR contains a program that tells the computer from which disk partition to load a secondary boot program (the "boot loader")." And so forth. This tells me a little bit about what I am looking at; assuming I am working with the first 512 bytes. But what is contained in the first 128 bytes of the MBR? I would appreciate if anybody can tell me that I am looking at the wrong area all together. And even if I am looking at the wrong place, I would still appreciate any type of documentation on MBR; preferably with regard to Windows 2000. What does the OS do to it, or put in it. thanx.