Windows ME will not boot

[Bradleylicious]

I am borrowing a friends laptop for the semister, and it has ME installed on it, and out of his preference it has to stay on it. Everything has been fine on it, but today out of the blue, it booted up and hung up on a screen that said "Insert System Diskette and press Enter to reboot." So i figured i would make an ME bootdisk, but of course that did nothing. I don't know if the ME CD would help...but i don't have it. Does anyone have an explaination of what is going on or what i could do to fix it. If possible reformatting is out of the question...Thanks

 

[Fern]

I have a laptop with ME on it (Toshiba).

The "ME" disk is actually a "configuration disk" (or similar wording). No "regular' ME disk was provided. If its the same for your lappy, you don't wanna use that. Cause it will reformat (i.e., cant do a reinstall over existing ME installation, thus saving data and other proggies).

Can you boot in safe mode?

Can you get to system restore, and roll back to a working system?


Good Luck with, and hopefully somone more knowledgeable than will post.

 

[Bradleylicious]

No the error message that i get appears to happen before windows is initiated, that is to say it happens immediatly after it asks me if i want to go into the bios.

 

[Bradleylicious]

bump

 

[MrChad]

Get a bootdisk from Bootdisk.com and run FDISK to see if it recognizes your partition. Because this happened unexpectedly, I'm thinking that either a) your partition table was corrupted, b) your master boot record was corrupted, or c) your hard drive is failing.

 

[Bradleylicious]

if i run fdisk...can i fix it? I mean even if i know that the partition is there, then what? what happens if "a" or "b" are corrupted...how can i fix them?

 

[daveshel]

Sounds like hard drive failure to me. I'll bet fdisk says 'no fixed disks found.'

 

[Bradleylicious]

well i don't know why...but i turned it on today, and it magically works fine...man do i hate ME...Thanks all...