Hmmm... I seem to have dug myself deeper and deeper into this huge pile of **** that I have on my desk. At first, I had a harddrive with a disk read error, so I went into that DOS recovery thingy and had a bit of a snoop around but everytime I tried to list the contents of the directory I downloaded that file to (so as to see if I could transfer it or something) it gave an error saying it couldn't list the contents, heck, it wouldn't even acknowledge that there were any directories besides 'C:\' even then trying to list what's in 'C:\' gives an error.
So I think: "Stuff it. I'll just format the harddrive and recover the files afterwards." So I remove the current partition, make a new one and set it to format NTFS (not so quick

) but on doing that it just hangs at 0%. So I did a cold shutdown and tried again with the same results. Then I thought that I'd use the recovery CDs that came with the VAIO instead, I choose to reformat with the default settings for my computer and it starts, lasts about 30 seconds and tells me that it can't access the harddrive and then it restarts, so I try and use the recovery CDs again but this time, use the Factory default settings rather than just normal default settings, and on top of that I choose to fill all the sectors of the harddrive with zeros, it said that it doesn't permenately delete data so I checked that box and moved on.
Five minutes into the filling of all the sectors of the harddrive with zeros, and I'm a pretty happy man

it is at 3% completion and has about two hours left to go, but at least it is actually doing something right? Well 10 minutes in and 7% completed I get an error stating that it wasn't able to complete the process. I restart and find to my
sheer joy that my computer is no longer recognizing that there is a harddrive within it at all. The BIOS says that there is no Primary And the WinXP Pro CD and the Recovery CDs agree with the BIOS, there is no harddrive in my machine

Now I've just turned on my VAIO again, now it seems to be recognizing that I have a hard drive in there. So I'm going to continue to fight battles with the problem I've got until after I've moved and then I'll hand it over to a computer technician to see if he can fix it for me if I already haven't at that time.
Basically, thanks for your help.
Loadsgood.