Reinstalling OEM WinME disaster.

[scissorman]

Reinstalled an OEM copy of WinME yesterday, following the manufacturers instructions to the letter - what a disaster!

I spent 14 hours yesterday trying to get it to work - even now, I keep getting 'add new hardware' wizard starting up, for 'unknown device' or 'other device'.

I cannot seem to be able to install my graphics card, despite following guidelines from the manufacturers and web sites - it keeps telling me that the driver I am about to install was not written for my card and may not work. Once it is installed my card is shown with a yellow exclamation mark on it. Sometimes when i try to install the NvIdia drivers it tells me that it does not detect an Nvidia chipset.

Most importantly, in device manager, these are the devices that now have a yellow exclamation mark beside them;

Direct memory controller
IO read data port for ISA PnP enumerator
Numeric data processor
PCI PCI-to-PCI Bridge
Programmable interrupts controller
System cmos/real time clock
System speaker
System timer
Unknown device
VIA AC'97 audio controller

beneath them, in the system devices, some of them are listed again, with the exclamation mark.Should I remove those with the exclamation mark?

I never, ever thought a windowsME reinstallation would be so catastrophic - thankfully I can connect to the web, but occasionally, when I boot up, I lose my CD drivers, for no rhyme or reason.

The question is - what do I do next? Reinstall from scratch, reinstall over this copy or smash the machine up?

 

[wolluf]

I'd start from scratch (fdisk & format). You don't say why you are reinstalling - previous problem? (you may be suffering effects of problem not resolved).