Hi again, tried all your suggestions but little luck so far. Using the repair from the CD option this appears to be working fine to start with but when it reboots and should continue I get the message "\system32\ntoskrnl.exe" missing or corrupt please reinstall a copy. How can I do that? or is there any other way I can just boot it up so I can try cloning from my backup if I can get it to work. thanks.

I finally got it to boot up and was then able to run Repair from the disk. Though I had it sorted but when I rebooted it I get as far as the welcome screen and login icon then get message about activation with yes or no boxes. No logs me off, so does yes. Stays on the welcome screen but I just go round in circles, cant get into Windows so cant access the net and activate. I may try a clean instal as a last resort but don`t really want to, probably still get the activation problem.

Just to let you know. I have now sorted the main problem. Put in another CD/DVD drive to start with as I was finding it hopeless to do anything. That worked fine and I was then able to do a clean instal which worked. Lost all my progs and docs of course. Having got thing to boot at last I was able to clone to the C drive from my external USB backup drive. Never expected that to work! but it did, got back all my programs and data. No longer requires the verification either. Not 100% solved but back on track I can sort the other bits as I go, some programs want the license key again for example, no problem but the whole thing has wasted a lot of my time I would love to know what causes this sort of thing in the first place, tell me if you can:-) Thanks very much to all for your input.

Ray