hi chris, thanks for the response. ive removed the unwanted files and the buggering thing wont load now. my problems are that i a) have no hard drive on th st and b) as i have regrettably been using cracked copies of cubase which a friend copied for me have no dongle either so in the spirit of needlessly irritating people on the internet with far too many questions; what does a dongle do and where can i get one and what kind of hard drive can i use for the st as i cannot get hold of an atari one anywhere. i understand i can use a scsi to acsi converter to adapt an existin' hard drive to fit but only with certain sizes and types. im bashing open old pc's at the moment so is there anything i should be looking out for? thanks for your help so far :O)