Hey Trip, i guess right now i have no problems with the recovery setup, i haven't figured out how to hide the recovery partition tho... it either hides all drives or no drives, attributes vol set hidden is the only command i could find for that, i am going through the posts you have put up. part 1 does become C when in recovery mode my bad that's fine i can expect that, my problem is that i can't login to windows, and i'm unsure if part 2 is actually being read as Drive C when i boot to the xp partition. making that one drive hidden might be the answer but as of now i'm sort of stuck. if any of that makes any sense i'll have a look through some more of that thread you mentioned.