Thank you all, especially to the person who posted the link... Decision made: i keep a Mac OS9 partition (...silly as it might seem, I prefer to keep things separated). As for the separate new drive, I now am really itching for it (as for a DVD reader/writer), but even at nowadays' low prices, those new toys are way beyond our (me and my lover's) means. The eMac my lover and I are sharing now was given to us by a wealthy friend of ours who was scared to hear we were merely contemplating the possibility to use PC's because they were cheaper than the new mac Machines and ran faster than what we had then: a 6200. But we don't know, maybe this wil happen sooner than we think... Thanks again to all. PH