Keep watching this space...

Sorry to say that DiskWarrior was attacking the problem when it decided to hang. Nothing would progress and the keys all went dead for many minutes. I left it going but 9 hours later called it a day. A repeat performance was seen second time around. A quick survey of the manual suggests that I no longer have, or have never had, the correct drivers in the machine. I have tried reloading Tiger from the discs Steve sent but when asked to select a drive to put it on there are no drives available. My hard drive doesn´t appear in the window.

Strangely enough the internal diagnostics say the drive is functioning normally.

It seems I am left with only two alternatives. Find another Mac and try to operate my drive from that using the firewire, or else just erase the disc and loose everything, then rebuild from scratch. I am loathed to do the later until I have exhausted the former as I have very useful files I´d like to keep and photos too on the hard drive...but then there are not many people with Macs around here...at least, none that I know. I will wait until the holidays and then take the machine to a Mac shop that has recently started up in Alicante.

So, until then I don´t expect to send many posts and sorry if I missed your birthdays Steve, Nic, Daniel, Claire et al.

Love to all and Merry Christmas...

Pete