Not what I need at the mo!!

Thats it!!!... After all that faffing Last Week !, My Hard Drive has got Norks-up!!!...

I can only assume that it had summut to do with the above!, but I dunno what!..

I had to re-boot today, and as my PC got past the 'Advent' logo it tried to boot from CD1 the CD2 then my external Maxtor ONE-touch... So I unplugged the Maxtor tried again only to get "No System Disk... Blah Blah Blah..."

I then tried the Advent Recovery thing! (they don't give you the OS)... Nope

I whipped the drive out a slung it into my old test system (AMD K6II 500) and the drive shows as "Unallocated Space"...

I found a copy of XP Pro (from Computeach so no licence) to see if the Recovery console will work... Nope - "Drive has an Unrecoverable Error".

I'm at a loss!.. Its out of warranty now!... And short of buying a copy of XP and a new hard drive... Which I can't afford!!!... I dunno what to do!, I've now got an empty box with no HDD...

I've had to haistally hook up my old (AMD4 1Gb) Compaq Presario laptop to tide us over till I can figure summut out!..

just buy a new hard drive and use the advent recovary disks to reinstall windows. Job done.!

The Advent recovery disc uses a hidden partition to re-install windows!...

I'm just gonna have to try to find a copy of Win XP Home (OEM) and see if the number on the sticker on the case works!... but I have no idea where from... As I technically have a licence can I just aquire (Copy from somewhere) a copy and still be legal???, or would I still have to buy one?.

Still need a hard disc though!... Any recomendations!?... the one that went FUBAR is a Maxtor 200Gb (Max 9 I think)...

Mum and dad are lending me the money!, but I don't want to spend too much of their money! (don't realy want to borrow any!... Pride and all!!).

Cheers
Sim.

I see in that case any XP home OEM cd will work as advent dont tend to use bios info locking on there cd keys. I have done this on many OEM system that went fubar without a problem. Just Obtain the ISO of xp home from the internet (i cannot tell you where)

I'd have no idea where to look, or the balls to believe its not been tampered with (spyware/trojans etc...).

I'm probly gonna wait and buy Vista (should be out end Nov ain't it??) when its released!... We've got the Laptop up and running nicely!... and the Maxtor Hard drive seems to be fine now (Formatted and currently running Linux )...

Still gotta borrow money from me parents!... but at least not as much!