Hi

The hard drive seems to have failed on my Dell Latitude x300, regretfully I had no back up.

This is what happened:

Opened IE7 and got "IE has encounterd a problem and needs to close"

Sent error report and a windows support page opened up and told me I had a hard drive problem, tried to reboot and got a long message in white on a black screen that said "We apologise for the inconvenience, but windows did not start successfully. A recent hardware or software change may have caused this......" plus a whole load of other stuff including options for restarting in safe mode, last known good config etc, but none of these worked, I just got the windows loading screen alternating with displays of this message, and briefly the Dell F2, F10, F12 options.

From then on I could only get in to the BIOS from F2: F10 and F12 achieved nothing at that time, (but see later)except a six line display of info.

Found the diagnostic self test on the support site and began to run it, passed every test on the list up to and including short status test then got a box that said "No diagnostic utility partition found, to run diagnostics, insert "Drivers and utilities" CD, which I don't have.

From the above, do you think it will be worth getting this CD, and how do I get it?

After this had another go at F12 and got a boot device select window, had a boot CD and got in to DOS with it, it gives an A:\> prompt, but am not very good at DOS. Do you think I could at least save the files in "Documents and settings" using DOS? When I enter c: or d: I get "invalid drive specification"

What are the drive letter allocations in this pc?

Many thanks