Right. firstly, sorry for the lack of posts over the weekend. my workstation went weird, and my imac was down due to hard drive updates, i was fixing an uncles comptuer and building one for someone else. so it was a busy weekend. anyway, i got an 80Gb hdd for my imac, a 7200RPM hitachi drive. its just gone into the machine on saturday, but i havent gotten anything working yet. i have formatted this a few times (2x with OSX 10.3, and once with OS9, which took 8 hours!). i have looked up info on the web which says i should make a 8gb partition (actually 8billion bytes so it should be about 7.3 or so GB) and use it as the boot drive. tried that and no luck. it may be something stupid like its ment to be 7.27gb and 7.3 wont work. so im going to try it later when i get home. more info later when i try it more.