Really appreciate your help Smoker!
I had quite a bit of free space on my c drive, probably 50mb or so?
I'm sorry but I know a bit about pc's etc but I know very little about partitioning or partitioning tools although I did use data lifeguard tools and ERD commander a good few years back. Does that count? Although to be honest I don't remember much about it!

Another thing to consider is to take this as the opportunity to buy a new hard disk. This allows you to do a fresh install of XP without destroying the possibility that there is some way to retrieve at least some of your data. Be sure to completely remove your old drive during the install, though, for obvious reasons. It will probably be faster and larger than your old disk, as well.

Thanks quakeboy02, something to consider!

If you only had 1 partition which you saw as C: in My Computer then you are out of luck then I'm afraid.
If you also had a D drive which wasn't a CD or DVD drive, then you may still be able to get at that.

But the problem at the moment is getting windows to see the drive at all.

You have to get a Live CD to format the drive and create at least one windows readable partition on it.

Hirens Boot CD can do that for you.
http://www.hirensbootcd.net/details/10.2.html

A bit difficult to burn it to disk without a working pc of course.

But to be honest, I would try to find a friendly local geek to help out. It's a bit too involved to do based on chatting over the internet.

Sorry.

Alan

Thanks for all the information Alan, really appreciated.
I'll get a copy of the cd and see, or maybe find someone who knows what they are doing rather than make it any worse myself!!
Thanks again.
John

If you have enough RAM (at least 1GB, 1.5 or 2 would be better) many LiveCDs can be loaded entirely into memory, allowing you to remove the CD so you can burn another one. You'll need the iso on an external drive unless you have loads of RAM (like 3GB+). Of course that assumes you have a CD writer and an existing LiveCD.

I think I heard that Puppy Linux completely loads into memory in Live CD mode, I am not sure if this would mean that you can take out the CD and still work with it.

DSL will definately fit into RAM. But he's not getting any choice at boot. No access to BIOS either.

I think he is getting the choice of where to boot:

Hmm. Is that a BIOS option, or is that the windows bootloader? BIOS is usually entered by holding down the "Delete" key when you power on.

It's not always the delete key.

It's often one of the F keys. See if it says something along the lines of press this key for options, settings, etc.

I forgot that I have a VirtualBox Windows XP here, and that does ask for F12 for boot options, so I'm thinking he's getting the Windows bootloader - which makes sense.

Have you try to boot with a Linux Live CD? try that and see if you can see your partitions.... I might be late on answering, also try to download Hiren's tool CD it has a lot of softwares which lets you fix your computer..


http://www.hiren.info/pages/bootcd


I hope my post helped you....

Regards Dan,

Thanks guy's, I'm still working on getting a Linux Live CD to try the options.
I'm really appreciating all your help and suggestions.

No problem anytime ........