OK, update time.
I had a brain wave
I put my HD in the pc and fired it up, of course Windows detected a different setup and wanted validation and what not, I phoned the hotline and explained, I got a new validation key and everything was fine.
1) I managed to load to desktop
2) I thought I'd try a restore to an ealier date.... big mistake, now it wont boot at all past the initial post, all I can get to is the F8 options window, you know the one with
start windows normally / safe mode / blah blah.
I have a system restore disk for that version of windows and it won't even detect it .................. so help again please.
TIA