Good Day,

my apologies for a slow reply, had to focus on another subject for a few days for a test. but im back to doing my project on ARM.

"consider this as the first test (quick test). Anyway for a project you can't use this layout."
yes, this is a rather good sign that atleast ive managed to program the board. confirms the drivers are working for the stlinkV2, confirms there are no other issues that I will need to investigate. the only thing standing between me and programming a project is just actual programming and basic knowledge on the IDE. I have the ZIP file of the HAL libraries too, so I will be able to clean up the folder and reinstall all the libraries in future if the need comes

it seems CubeMX is a nice way of getting a lot of files generated for you. I do sense there are a lot of things that I would miss though if I start with just generating files from cubeMX, I think its best I do it manually and when I get used to the folder structures and all the kinks around the IDE, I will use CubeMX to simplify things that I already know.

starting up, I create a new folder in my USB for a project workspace as described ciprian and dautre.
-as mentioned, I must keep this a clean environment
ac6 immediately asks me to pick a work space, so I direct myself to the folder in my USB (im aware this could cause issues for if the drive letter changes etc. I will reconfigure every time I work on it again)

for the first try, i follow word by word what ciprian says

so I create a folder called "Development work" (is this the project name that I can change to anything I want?)
then I create a subfolder called SW4STM32 (can I change this name in future?)
then I copy Middlewares and drivers (and utilities, i saw it on your image) and copy them into my "Development work" folder
then I go to the example folder and copy inc and src folders also into my "development work" folder.
now in my development folder, the following folders are there
-.metadata (i think this was created because I started eclipse and set this place as workspace)
-drivers
-inc
-middlewares
-RemoteSystemTempFiles
-src
-SW4STM32
-utilities

then I went on eclipse, created a new project, chose SW4STM32 as the folder (I had to switch workspace because it choosing this folder would overlap default workspace, this would mean that I can work from my usb, I would just have to specify the workspace as "development work" folder)
chose ac6 stm32 under executable
when clicking next, I saw they wanted me to select configurations, can I get a brief description to what configurations are in this page? I left this alone and clicked next.
I selected the nucleo F401RE board and clicked next
I clicked on no firmware and then clicked finish, but then I got an error saying that one of the files already exist.
on the project explorer, the inc and src folders were empty.
using the tree structure, I started copying folders into the SW4STM32 folder for items that I would need
I copied inc and src. then I copied drivers (I will have to figure out how to link this to my project without copying it to my projects everytime)
copying drivers didnt work, I checked in main.h, they included 2 libraries called stm32f4xx_nucleo.c and stm32f4xx_nucleo.h, i copied these to my inc and src folders (im starting to understand that inc and src holds all .h and .c files respectively)

the main.c has a red cross icon on it, I dont understand what is causing this, something has not been included. there are lots of errors that say "Symbol "some function" could not be resolved" (these are missing)
I had forgotten to copy a library called stm32f4xx_hal.h
once including stm32f4xx_hal.h, there were even more errors showing more libraries that were not included, firstly stm32f4xx_hal_rcc.h which was included int the stm32f4xx_hal.h. it was in the same folder as stm32f4xx_hal.h
so I added it to the inc folder. I began noticing all the HAL libraries were required.

this problem is looping over and over again. need to find a better solution