On 10/31/15 16:52, Charlie Pridham wrote:

Card slots, I meant I have a range of card slots on this machine to take
SD, MMC, XD, T-F, MS, and MD cards along with a single USB 2.0, these
all sit where you would normally find the 3.5" floppy, I have two
further USB's on the front and 4 more at the rear , the ones at the rear
are straight off the motherboard and marked "USB Lan", the ones at the
front have a different connection but still plug direct to the mother
board, but none will register any form of extended memory, yet all work
fine running a printer, wireless mouse/keyboard etc.

That's not quite what I understood, and is somewhat less likely to be a
hardware problem, but that's still plausible. If it were me, I would do
as Jeff Layman says - booting from a Linux live CD is recovery mode (the
alternative is install mode, and you don't want that).


Regards,
Nick Maclaren.