Sorry, i was at work earlier and was trying to work and beg for help all at the same time!

The tree thing is something we found in F12 boot menu. There is a fancy looking windows appearing thing when we have the recovery disc in and that one came up fine. There is also a Dos looking one with out the Disk in and that pings up an error with the harddrive- basically says it cant find it.

The recovery disk we have is a driver disk, we cant find the original Windows disk, i think i may have misplaced it when we moved a couple of months back. It took me a couple of hours to find what we have

I can find the one for the tower PC we have but they are different makes so the disks wont work will they?

My other half has it downstairs having a little look under the keyboard. He is having a look see if there is anything loose. Its safe with him as he is far more "fiddly" than me.

I have phoned a local PC repair shop, and the guy said the HDD is goosed and says he'll replace and re- install windows for Ł100. I dont know if thats good or bad but at least it's something to fall back on.

Luckily we didn't have anything stored on the laptop. But it has made me think that i have quite alot on this and i would hate to loose it, so if anyone can point me in the right direction for a crash course in backing up my files that would be most appreciated

Thanks again
A xx