guday everyone, im just curous how a cv shaft works, my front left inner cv joint has totally gone and ive lost drive, can somebody explain or educate me on how ive lost drive because of the inner left cv?i mean shouldnt the right side be able to move the car?i may sound a littlke silly but id like to know how it works and yes had to tow it home and yes had plenty of time to not let get this far.

got similar problem a while ago, but my tranny was gone!

The loss of drive is because your diff is splitting torque equally between the two front wheels. I would guess that a busted CV joint requires almost no torque to turn and because the torque is split equally between the two front wheels, almost no torque is provided to the other wheel.

Like when you are 4X4ing, if you have a wheel off the ground that will will spin and the opposite won't, so, if you only have one wheel for power, the busted CV side will react as if the wheel is off the ground like 4X4ing and the wheel on the road won't spin at all

http://www.jkautomotive.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/cv.joint_.diagram.gif

Think of it as a cup with 3 ridges inside, these push against 3 balls. The 3 balls push against a shaft with 3 grooves in it. So the outer cup rotates the inner shaft through the balls, and the balls allow the shaft to swivel. (yes I know that sounds dirty if you have a dirty mind)
Similar to a universal joint, the CV stands for Constant Velocity I believe, the universal joint allows torque to be transfered at slight angles, but too much of an angle and the speed of the shaft rotating speeds up and slows down every 90 degrees of rotation, which is ok for use on a front engine RWD cars driveshaft to the diff as its relatively straight, but in FWD cars there is more change of angle.
If it breaks, you end up with just the cup spinning and the balls have probably fallen out or similar, and there is no load on that driveshaft, so unless you have a fully locked differential (e.g. welded, not just limited slip), there will be no torque sent to the wheel that still works.

thanks very much people, now i understand it...gonna get it towd next week to the garage