Thank you dbminter,
The three usb ports on the laptop haven't worked for a few years, again a common fault with this machine, I was using a pcmcia card with usb ports but this is not recognized and being a legacy free machine I cant change the bios. I tied to burn the first of three cd's using a cradle connecting the hard drive to a friends laptop and using the builder in imgburn but half way through it said it couldn't recognize a file, not sure but I think it was a cab file. If you could advise if it would be possible to burn all three cd's to the hard drive using a cradle and would this work and if so what is the correct way to transfer the recovery cd's using imburn,
Thanks again.