I have booted from a dosboot disk with ASPI USB DRIVERS and hairu masstoreage device driver. The USB ports are recognised and the device is found, when i try to access the drive as c: the error message reads. Invalid media type reading drive c. The drive is formatted NTFS, could this be the reason? Any help would be appreciated;-)

Yep. DOS does not understand NTFS (NT File System). It only understands FAT16/24. Windows 9x version of DOS understands FAT32. There is a driver for DOS that allows you to read (but not write) to a NTFS disk from DOS, called READNTFS.exe that might work.

JackG: There is no FAT24! DOS understands FAT12, FAT16 and FAT32(FAT32 is only supported by higher versions of DOS, such as MS-DOS 7.10/8.0, PC-DOS 7.10, ROM-DOS 7.10, DR-DOS 7.05, PTS-DOS Pro 2000 and FreeDOS).

danny The drivers will NOT be able to recognize a partition that your boot OS is unable to handle. DOS can only handle various versions of FAT However, you have nothing to lose in trying NTFS Reader for DOS - a freeware tool to read NTFS partitions from DOS. Get it here: http://www.ntfs.com/products.htm You can find other interesting DOS utilities here: http://www.opus.co.tt/dave/utils.htm HTH madmaxUSB :-)

Thanx for your help, that sorted it. i can now get access to the disk drive, and save data to it. What i am trying to do is put Powerquest drive image on the removeable disk and backup to it. When i run the pqdi.exe the screen sits at the command line, what is interesting, is if i pull out the usb connector the pqdi program appears straight away, is this a memory issue? I dont want you arguing this time but any information would be appreciated;-)

> When i run the pqdi.exe the screen sits at the command line, what is interesting, is if i pull out the usb connector the pqdi program appears straight away, is this a memory issue? I dont want you arguing this time but any information would be appreciated;-) Am sorry - but have not seen this behavior on PQ before. I am more familiar with Ghost 2K3 - but I suspect PQ cannot properly detect all drives, so when you unplug USB, it has no drive access issues anymore. Good luck ;-)