Thanks for all the input. I believe this fight is over, the brilliant tech guy... Came up with the plan of simple erasing the hd, calling lenovo for the install disks, reinstall from a USB cd rom drive. Lenovo doesn't give install disks for this, and I have now picked up my erased hd from the shop. Supposedly I could send it to lenovo and they'd install the os with the original hd in, but I bought this s10 with an hd upgrade, don't have the original.
- my only saving grace is to get the hd into an enclosure, get syslinux to run on it so the dellminiboot can let me re install the os