g'day all, I thank you for your very prompt replies. appologies, I should have told you it is a acer laptop, that I had made factory recovery discs for and I get no offer of repair. I did boot using the partition wizard cd but partition would not stay active and I still could not allocate a drive letter (that part was greyed out) I do thank you again for your effort to help me but have decided to bite the bullet, learn from MY mistakes and do a factory recovery.