Help me help a friend with Windows ME

[JoeBob]

I have a neighbor with Windows ME on a PIII 866 Gateway PC. The PC froze up during use, not sure what they were doing, and now it gets hung up at the ME splash screen. I can hear the hard drive endlessing looping and I figure they have a bad hard drive, not likely, or the OS got corrupted.
The problem is that I have never touched ME and most familiar with 2000. Does ME have go back, and if so how do I use it if I cannot get the system to load the OS? I am prepared to reinstall the software, but would rather not unless I have to.
Any suggestions would be appreciated by this ME noob. Thanks in advance!

 

[Chadder007]

Friends don't let friends use ME.

 

[JoeBob]

Very true. However, not my choice and not overly helpful. Anybody able to help?

 

[joshg]

Just curious, and no this probably won't help toooo much...

But have you tried booting up in safe mode? If this indeed works then it could further increase the chance that it would be an OS system file issue, maybe?

Hmmm..

 

[MrChad]

Can you boot into safe mode?

edit: beat me to it

 

[JoeBob]

I had not tried booting into safe mode as I can get no farther thatn the system check and the the OS splash screen. How do I get to safe mode if I cannot get past this stage? Please let me know. Thanks for the posts.

 

[IamDavid]

keep pressing f8 after the bios duriong bootup.

 

[JoeBob]

I could not get into safe mode. I tried to run system restore from the system disk, but it still hung up. I wound up just reformatting and that did the trick. ME is garbage IMHO.