Thanks - I've made some progression, i've found some software that may be able to recover the files, or if possible rebuild the master boot table (or something - thats probably the problem).
What ive also done is buy a new 250gig disk (should arrive monday), and im going to use a sector by sector copying program (booted from floppy) so that i can work on that, so that if anything goes wrong i still have the original.
Any other thoughts let me know
Pete