Hi Larry,
Dell are sending the disks out this week FOC thankfully. I actually fixed the PC today by putting in my XP disk and accessing the repair consul. Once in the dos prompt, I performed a checkdisk (chkdsk /p) I think the command is. The scan picked up one or more errors on the drive. Upon reboot the computer loaded Windows XP and everything seems ok.
At least I'll have the proper disk, should a hardrive fail, to perform a complete reinstall, but thankfully it hasn't come to that. It was a pain in the backside, but at least its taught me a few new tricks in repairing PC's and salvaging data.
Thanks for the offer of supplying the disk though. It is appreciated.
All the best,
AK