Yeh, it's as dead as a Do-Do once its got past the sector band selector.
As I said, I've tried various settings including leaving it alone. Having said that, it does flash up a 4" square light blue screen saying wait a moment, for a subliminal amount of time. There is a partition on the faulty drive - it was the restore section , but it seems to be empty but fully functional.
Anyway, the point is that this partition never gets displayed. Once you pick the physical drive, nothing ever gets displayed again.
Thanks for you input on this by the way. One is not desperate for these photos for the next few days, got to see if the DVD is in London yet.
I still feel the most likely scenario was that W7 tried to reach to an XP drive and do a CheckDrv on it. this is the one time that I let it run.
The prog arrived at 5,971Kb BTW...seems to install perfectly.