I have a new problem.

I can't reformat the harddisk.

I've tried it on a spare PC which I now believe does NOT recognise the full 120Mb of the HDD - it's an old PC and I have nothing else. So it sees it running OK under the XP system as a slave drive, but does not format the full drive - either under XP disk management or partition magic.

WhenI move the HDD to its own PC ...
DOS veriosn of partition magic starts up and then freezes with a divide error. The new Partition Table Doctor software does the same.

How can I format this disk

Rannoch

Perhaps these links may help:

http://www.23cc.com/free-fdisk/

http://www.fdisk.com/fdisk/

Also if you know the manufacturer of the drive there is usually a utility from their site:

http://www.tacktech.com/display.cfm?ttid=287

Life after Packard Bell

Well, finally got the HDD to format - also had to downlaod a utility from Seagate to reset the disk.

Now to the recovery.
A Packard Bell software recovery is a bit messy. The PC was not supplied with recovery CDs, but had the BACKUP parttition which contains the recovery software. You are supposed to create a set of Master CDs when you get the machine. Wonder how many people do that.
The other part here is that you get one chance to create the CDs - if you have a bad CD when creating the disks, or a system fault, or select a wrong option, etc you've lost your chance - it deletes the BACKUP partition.
Anyway, no CDs - phoned Packard Bell. Yes we can supply CDs at £42.99, and you will need tech support at £1.50 a minute to help you tattoo the HDD (stick an identifier in bios and on a hidden sector on the HDD).
Found the instructions of the tattooing, but this is really OTT.

I'm thinking of ignoring the Packard Bell stuff, using a standard XP Home CD.

Can anyone advise me a of source for a cheap but legit XP Home CD. Cheapest I can see is Amazon stores at approx £70 and e-Bay at around £55

Rannoch

That appears to be about the bottom line price that I see.

If you click the Auctions tab at the top of this site you will find one copy going @ Current bid: UK £65.56 from DJNafey

fwiw I think purchasing an XP CD is the best idea.