Tried the disk thing - still no joy.
Reason for formatting is that windows stopped loading for some reason. I tried to repair/install over and ended up with 2 versions of windows, one working the other not. However the working one could not access any of the programmes and I was faced with duplicating these as well. Also, it had a lot of junk files, so having read that it was an easy job (and that some people reformat regulally - can you believe!) it seemed like a good idea at the time.
How do you go about the disk check you referred to?