Thanks i finally got  to the machine to try and found that ubuntu 13.4 works nicely. Boots, mounts the drives and allowed me to copy and wipe the drive;  where infact Dells own recovery discs fail to regonize the drives at all. So much for Dell support. so no need to continue the thread
Has any one successfully booted a new 2710 with a live linux cd\dvd to access the installed hdd; ifso what works? TIA 
XPS 2710 27" windows 8 boot from linux distro