[LivinLOS]

Long story...

What happened was had a win2k part on there which was the 1st drive and had the boot.ini which default called XP on the second partition with 1 sec delay, I cant remember when I last used 2k but the HD was large enough to leave it in case of a 'missing file'..

The XP partition even set active wont boot because its past that sector that a drive neeeds to be below to be bootable..

So formatting the 2k part during a fresh xp install (the other one is old and bogged down with 2 years of crud installs) cleared the boot ini and halfway through the install process XP choked..

The other thing is the part table has got a problem.. I have tried a few linux iso self contained install ideas to then run fdisks etc and they are reporting errors... I have installed a few different MBR tools but none have saved it so far.. So many things also working against me like having 3 desktops and this laptop but not a single floppy disk drive to make partition magic boot disks (or read those discs to make a boot CD) the stupid makers of part magic assume that a rescue disc has to be a floppy which in this day is nuts (what good is 1.44MB storage device)...

Like the end of the italian job... I have an idea (famous last words)...