ME to XP

[FredJim]

Need help ….. a lotta help !!

Trying to help a friend with his computer………it was real glitchy and full of ad ware, spyware, and virus’. Got rid of the virus’, and most the adware, but it was still glitchy. My friend did not have a restore disk for this computer, nor an OS disk. I tried to reinstall Windows ME from the Setup.exe inside the computer, when I did it came up with many errors during the install, and ultimately when all was said and done when trying to boot it, it will only go to the welcome screen and no further…..it does the same thing when I try to start it in safe mode too. So I tried to upgrade it to XP….that didn’t work either…it’s doing the same thing. So I figured I’d do a clean install of XP, I got the bootup disks and tried but it won’t work. Here’s what I need you very smart people to tell me……how do I get this back to a working order …in other words, with a clean install of XP. I can’t even get to a command prompt….I’m at a loss. Please help me.

My friend is taking online courses at University of Phoenix and really needs the computer !!

Jim

 

[jrbarnett]

1. Boot the computer from a DOS floppy or CD.
2. Copy off all the data if you haven't already done so (as its an ME to XP upgrade, unless you opted to convert the filesystem to NTFS there will not be a problem accessing the files), but they will have the short 8.3 character filenames.
3. Use FDISK from the floppy to remove the existing partition.
4. Boot PC from XP setup CD
5. Follow instructions to install XP, including drivers, service pack, windows updates as needed.
6. Install applications
7. Restore data

Alternative option to recover the data without losing the long filenames is to slave it to another 2K/XP computer and copy the data off it there.

John