Thanks for your replies.

Midknyte: Tried to boot from recovery partition but laptop doesnt seem to have one (previous owner upgraded HardDrive to larger capacity)

Midknyte: Created a system repair disc but this made no difference at all - the laptop goes straight to windows boot manager with same error code. Do i need to tell the laptop to boot from disc or would this automatically happen?

SpywareDr: I dont have a Windows 7 installation DVD to be able to follow your instructions.

Any other suggestions?