I just moved my system from a SCSI drive to an IDE drive. (I know I'm moving the wrong direction for performance, but I don't care about that right now) All seemed to work out fine. After a bit ot troubleshooting and playing trick-the-grub a bit my system boots and the bootloader even points to a kernel that exists. Now my problem is that since the HDD swap, whenever I have moderate HDD usage, my CPU usage goes to 100%. So far this is what I know: motherboard: soltek SL75DRV2 / Abit KT7 (both thunderbird processors with VIA chipsets) hard drive: IBM 07N9210 (80 gig 7200 rpm IDE) / Maxtor 40 gig 7200 rpm IDE (model 6L040J2 ?) running EXT3 on the drives. behaves the same when the filesystems are mounted as EXT2. running debian with kernel 2.4.19 I tried installing RH7.3 with kernel 2.4.18-10 onto one of the drives and it does not have the same problem there. I would, however, like to contine using debian without having to reinstall the system. Any ideas of what would be causing this behavior? TIA, - Kremer