OK lets just say that the horse is well and truely beaten to death.

I had to do a restore to factory settings with my OEM disk (reformat and re-install) JOB DONE just had to reinstall all my programs ;-(

I have not re-tried to get to the repair screen (as I have no need to) but being an crappy OEM install I guess I will never get to see it?

Aside from this a bit I am having trouble validating my preistalled copy of xp, none of the product keys I have avaliable (on the machine and on the cd case) are correct.

It is the last time I buy a preinstalled version of xp. I had no idea what I was doing at the time, just needed a laptop. But I am learning now.

Thanks for your comments though.

clik the phone it in section and they will give you the validation # or what ever it called .just give them the key # off the bottom of the laptop .good luck

a dead horse to beat! cannot pass up that chance. if windows is so busted on the HDD that it can't be recognised, then you will not get the repair option. eg. if boot.ini points to wrong/invalid partition, that sort of thing.... wrong number of partitions in bootloader code... no repair option.