good to see you Andy, you must have used hirens boot cd, i used mini windows xp to get on to the c drive, normally if the windows dir is
, i wipe it and reinstall windows, without touching me data, but this time i couldn't access c thru mini windows xp, showed the drive but not the capacity, after trying a few utils and virus scanners, scan disk progs, chkdsk would struggle on the second pass, 3rd pass it just reboot the pc, booted with an xp install disk, went to repair console, ran chkdsk from there, took ages but found no errors, reboot the pc, windows loaded fine
not lost one bit..