Come to think about it I did format the busted win 7 disk from the XP disk,so bios detected two sata disks that time and allowed me to select the xp disk to boot from in setup,hmmm most mysterious,the sata DVD drive chose this time to go TU so I had to dig out a old IDE DVD drive to reload windows from.
The original problem with the hard disk was a reluctance to boot and booting into repair mode when it did,then reporting it could not repair disk,I blame it on deleting avast anti virus from the disk as one was fed up with popups from avast demanding money,reckon the buggah did somehing spitefull as it left,
Did the usual thing to try and fix the hd,tried system restore ect but it reported I had no system restore points to restore from,so it had oviously scragged them as well.
Never mind everthing is chugging along fine now.
