At lvl 12..

I go kill the dragon (first 1 outside Whiterun), with the help of the guards/jarls chic/faendel (Faendel was my follower) and come back and talk to the Jarl and he made me Thane. I had no house at this point.

I was like yay, and didn't notice that I was supposed to get a Lydia. She did not show up in dragonsreach (near the door) or anywhere I could see. I have since looked everywhere, even bought the house and looked there, still no Lydia.

Problem is, I didn't know about Lydia until I was like lvl 14 (was reading these forums), and I have saved over my save files that I had from lvl 12.

Is there a console cheat to spawn her into the game, or do I have to start a new character to get her?

Ok.

I re-installed the game (Deleting all old info [even My Games stuff])

I started a new char. Same thing happened. She does not exist anywhere.

No mods/codes used. Still she did not exist anywhere in Whiterun/Dragonsreach after being made Thane.

This time I made sure I had the house before doing the Dragon quest to become thane.

There's a console code to spawn any character in the game, but I don't remember it off the top of my head. Try searching UESP or something...dunno if they have Lydia's base ID yet or not (I'm not a modder, so I don't know what can and can't be accessed without the cc).

Well if you need to you can open console and type help "Lydia" 0 and then see the ID for her, then use the command player.placeatme xxx
xxx being the ID you got from the first command

Yup...it was a placeatme code with her id...worked a treat...

Thanks