King Of Bling - yes saving every few mins is all well and good, but from what she has said, even if she saved it 58 times into different folders on the laptop it wouldn't matter - the OS is corrupted and the work will still be lost!

jamieslittleracer - What Jim says is the best way. You need a cable that you can plug into the hard drive of your dead laptop, and connect it to the USB slot on a PC. Then you should be able to access the data on the HDD, find your essay (and anything else you want to save) and retrive it, and save it on the PC.

If you simply re-install Window's onto your laptop hard drive, you will lose EVERYTHING you had on there. As far as "repair the problem" - to be honest I have never done it, so I don't know if it will save your stuff or if you will lose it....

This is the sort of thing you need;

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/USB-2-0-TO-DUA...QQcmdZViewItem

You might aswell buy one at some point, but I realise that time is a facotr here so buying one now won't sort your current problem. But if you pop into a Maplins or similar, you might be able to get one today - at a push, you could buy this from Maplin;

http://www.maplin.co.uk/Module.aspx?...verter&doy=5m3

You should be able to stick your laptop hdd in there and plug it into your PC with the USB cable....