I should add that I’m fairly experienced with stripping down laptops as I have a number of retro Toshibas but the Rock laptop is defeating me

It's a rebrand of Clevo's M57RU (the sticker on the back gives it away as being Clevo/Sager).

Make sure you've got ALL screws loose then just use a guitar pick wherever the case doesn't come open easily.

And should you ever need spare parts, just search for Clevo M57RU spare parts. Since Rock used their laptop as base, chances are most parts can be sourced from different rebrands of Clevo - I've done the same thing with 2 similar Clevo laptops under 2 different brands (one was Tuxedo, the other was Wortmann Terra)

You are wonderful! I used your info to find out more about it and the bit I was going wrong was that I didn’t notice the tiny keyboard clips that you press in. Once that was off and the metal plate was removed, it came away. I can now look at repairing the blown / loose speakers (and I’ve got photos of them should I find replacements. I can also replace my cmos.

Thank you so much

I’m now trying to install XP on it and getting the usual stop error due to the fact it doesn’t recognise the sata controller during setup.

Do you know what sata driver/ sata chipset it uses so I can load the files onto a floppy disk

Intel PM965