[Bedsit Bob]

I think what the OP is most concerned about, is his/her personal files.

If they can get access to the HDD, they can rescue them, before re-installing Windows.

Mind you, it's starting to sound more like a hardware problem, than a OS problem.

[max99]

Originally Posted by spiney2

assuming u have an optical drive then on another working computer download the gparted live distro and burn it to a blank cd "as iso file".

boot your dell from this.gparted should run and will confirn the disk partitions are still there if hardware ok.

if no joy then either run dell system recovery from hard disk or use gpartrd and boot into the recovery partition.

restoring original operating will overwrite system partition. then use recuva freeware to get back as much of the data as u can ......

That's not the way to go about retrieving data from a non-booting system. Either connecting the drive to another machine or booting from something like a Linux/BartPE disk should be the first options. Regardless, it's clearly not something the OP wants to do herself.

[Zenith]

Originally Posted by spiney2

knoppix is a linux distro that runs from the optical drive only. it can temporarily connect to your wireless router for internet but will not fix a broken windows system.

The reason I mentioned Knoppix, was because I had already tried 2 other live CD's which were designed to recover files from a non-bootable hard drive. I think Bart was one, & the other I cannot remember, but neither of them could see any of the partitions on my drive.

It was only when I booted a Knoppix live CD, that I could see my hard drive partitions again, & could recover any important files before reinstalling Windows.

For some reason Knoppix could see my hard drive partitions where other recovery discs could not.