Hi guys
thanks Wazik for the advice but it was to no avail - the hard drive is goosed and I've lost everything I'm sure
On a PC help forum someone gave me some advice which to type in when in Recovery mode, one command was
fixboot, anyway to cut a long story short this seemed to have made my hard drive show up as 4G (all free space) instead of 120G (approx 70G free).
Also started getting HARD DISK FAILURE 50% of the time when trying to boot up, I then put another clean hard drive in and got HARD DISK FAILURE again, which suggested the motherboard was fucking it up or something.
Finally got it working but it showed my old drive (as slave) as having 120G but all free space, so 50G of used space was now unused ie data gone
Dunno what happened to it, maybe the motherboard was dying and caused the drive to fuck up, odd how the clean drive I put in had similar problems.
Anyway, I reinstalled windows on it (after quick format) and it worked (this on another PC as master drive) so I took it out, put it back in my PC and it came up HARD DISK FAILURE
So am resigned to the fact my data is lost, I'm currently using my daughters PC which she is not exactly happy about (myspace/messenger withdrawals) and am on the lookout for a new PC.
(I'm having great fun logging into my daughters accounts and pretending to be a 14yo girl....eeeh, the things people say to me....disgusting perverts....shocking....errr I'm off now for another chat session
)