Ah, but in my case I have two hard discs and am replacing the second drive. So with the telnet server already installed on the first drive I should be able to replace the second drive, manually partition and format it, and then install the player software to the new drive all without using a serial connection.

Though to make life easier I think I'll just get hold of a laptop hdd to PC IDE adaptor and do everything on my PC!

Thanks for all your suggestions.
Ross