I keep thinking the best option is to boot from a very complete live-cd, hopefully from a similar distribution. Test all the hardware and then look up what the OS installed for your problem-children hardware. But I haven't tried it so I don't know if it will work. I do lean toward Knoppix for the purpose since it almost always loads the right drivers, but I don't know if it will hold up with new Win8 hardware. . Doug Reed.