OK, OK, found the serial cable, applied the developer image, it won't drop to the shell though. Tried booting up with just the 10Gb drive and it works OK - did as per the FAQ and I could see it in Emplode, re-sync, etc, etc.

However, if I boot up with both drives (reardless of which is drive 0), or with just the 40Gb, it whizzes straight past the point where I can get at the shell prompt and ends up stuck at the "Building music databases" screen. Pressing "q" at any point after this part:

"Remounting second music partition read-only
Press 'q' now to go into development mode. You Have Zero Seconds To Comply...
Starting player"

has no effect on the player. The developer image has now been applied independantly to both drives, but it seems to make no difference. When it's trying to start up I get lots of messages like

"Remounting filesystem read-only
EXT2-fs error (device ide0(3,4)): ext2_free_blocks: Freeing blocks not in datazone - block = 4185227054, count = 1"

If I can't get to the shell I'm a bit snookered, aren't I ?

Steve.