Cheers Rob. If the new drive shows signs of doing the same thing, I might have to do that at some point.

I'm wondering if this could be the basis of a theory as to why some people experience intermittant boot errors - something on the VFD is generating noise, the problem is worse when it's cold (which seems logical) and some drives (Fujitsus in particular) are more prone to being effected by it than others.

Now all I need to work out is a) how on earth you can actually test whether that's the case, and b) how you overcome the problem!

Dominic