John,
Thanks for your trouble and suggestions.

1. I am aware of reformatting, and the problems which can occur between different drives. When I get the drive back, I will see if I can format a disk. The position at the moment is that it will not properly read ANY disk. Roland have now quoted ($200) for a repair, as they are able to obtain a drive, but it will take 3 weeks. Seems pricey, but what can we do?

2. We do have a good Yamaha MIDI keyboard (at least, my son does) which we can use in an emergency. But Dawne does not want to lug it to gigs if possible, she already has enough kit to carry.

In the next few days, we are going to try to capture the output from the Keyboard, via MIDI out port to the SD35, and onto CD. We will use that until the drive is fixed.

The Italian unit is not actually MIDI, it imports into its own format.
Don't know if it has downloadable sounds, as we didn't check for that.
(We like the Sound Canvas sounds.)

The problem with the laptop solution is that one person who tried has reported buffer overrun problems - the SD35 couldn't keep up with the PC. That maybe due to the USB-MIDI interface that he used, but I don't know.

I HAVE seen a Sound Canvas card for the PC advertised , but it was expensive.

Neil