just done the chkdsk /r an it took proper ages, got to 60% held there for ages then said one or more issues may not be repairable and stopped. Did a reboot and still same message. cannot find .... Recovery console still reports it cant find a registry. Just looking around for a better recovery tool, remember in the day Norton Disk Doctor was king but not sure about nowadays? Anyone know of anything that I can boot from and use to recover some of the lost windows files. Not too fusses about my grot but I dont want work to try recover any data and get all manner of dodgy filenames coming up. Lesson to be learnt here I think