thanks for the help.

Do you mind running me through the parallel install. I'm assuming I select the current partition and then is at simply as selecting to not format the drive.

Also with the LiveCD, I had no idea what that was till you just mentioned it. IF I boot from that CD, is it simply a matter of copying my files to my external hard drive. Does it need to be formatted in any particular way - its currently NTFS.

Thanks again for all your help