Hello Only A Hobo. Thank you very much for all your help and suggestions. I've managed to follow the instructions with no problem.You might like to know the loss was caused by the 'log off' shutdown which deleted an important file (so the engineer said).It happened to be the startup file it deleted and wasn't caused by anything I had running in the system. The loss meant that the entire hard-drive had to be rebooted via a 'rescue disk' thus deleting everything in the system - it was as though I had bought the computer new. Nonetheless,thank you so very much for your very kind help.A