SRS -

You asked earlier about the "Recovery Console." It is apparently a WinXP feature. Apparently I've used components of it (rarely) without ever seeing that name applied to what I was doing.

Ordinarily I'd say look it up in Help on your own machine, but that wouldn't be too helpful with a dead machine.

The Intro information from WinXP help search for "Recovery Console" is:
[cut-n-paste]

Recovery Console overview

If safe mode and other startup options do not work, you can consider using the Recovery Console. This method is recommended only if you are an advanced user who can use basic commands to identify and locate problem drivers and files. In addition, you must be an administrator to use the Recovery Console.

Using the Recovery Console, you can enable and disable services, format drives, read and write data on a local drive (including drives formatted to use NTFS), and perform many other administrative tasks. The Recovery Console is particularly useful if you need to repair your system by copying a file from a floppy disk or CD-ROM to your hard drive, or if you need to reconfigure a service that is preventing your computer from starting properly.

There are two ways to start the Recovery Console:

If you are unable to start your computer, you can run the Recovery Console from your Setup CD.
As an alternative, you can install the Recovery Console on your computer to make it available in case you are unable to restart Windows. You can then select the Recovery Console option from the list of available operating systems on startup.
After you start the Recovery Console you will have to choose which installation you want to log on to (if you have a dual-boot or multiple-boot system) and you will have to log on with your administrator password.

The console provides commands you can use to do simple operations such as changing to a different directory or viewing a directory, and more powerful operations such as fixing the boot sector. You can access Help for the commands in the Recovery Console by typing help at the Recovery Console command prompt.

For information on starting and using the Recovery Console, see Related Topics.

Once you are running the Recovery Console, you can get help on the available commands by typing help at the command prompt.

[end paste - bold added]

There are quite a few additional entries at WinXP Help, but I haven't checked to see if they're the typical Microsoft multiloop back and forth between 3 articles. If you can get the "console" started from an installation/setup CD you should be able to use its internal Help for what you'll need.

If your warranty is still good, and if you can get into Dell, the Recovery Console is probably "for later if needed." (?)

John