If you have spare machine or a friend with one you can copy the data there.
There are lots of nice USB adapters for IDE and SATA drives out there for under $40 which are basically designed for this situation.

I know I will have to use mine tomorrow. I thought I had dodged at bullet with running a repair from the vista disk but the current chkdsk error I am getting point to flatten reload time. I am not too happy with Dell about this but that is seperate issue.

Thanks for the reply/. I ought to have said, but unfortunately this error screeen occurs everytime I load the pc and so I cannot even get to desktop. I have tried loading in safe mode and I get the error. As do I when i try and put it in last known system configuration. A little stumped on what to do. IS there a way I can access the desktop to have get to these files?

Thanks

Rob

Re-read the answer above.  Remove the hard drive, mount it into a 2.5" external USB drive case, and attach it to a working system by USB.  Take ownership of the files you need, and back them up on the working system's hard drive.

Then you can either proceed with troubleshooting or wipe the system clean and start over.