Thanks for the reply John, but question....

I understand what you are saying about the consistancy issue being possible... but say I had a corrupt master occur on a production system, could I not just shut down the sql service, copy over a previous mdf and ldf for the master, start the service and be on my way? What would be an intelligent arguement to that? What are some of the obvious reasons not to do that?

I have attached/detached db's before, not system db's though so unsure how that process differs and haven't found info on it yet.

Thank you,

Karen