I bought some new RAM last night in an effort to begin eliminating the cause of some of the problems I've had within Windows ME (freezing, rebooting on its own, numerous blue screens). I plugged the new (256 mb) RAM into the first slot and plugged the original (128 mb) RAM into the second slot. The computer started up and even recognized the new RAM, according to the 393216 KB OK message shown. When it went to start up Win ME though, it said "Boot Failure: Please insert system disk and press enter to retry". It also had a message that it was trying to boot from the CD-ROM. It was as though it couldn't boot from my hard drive, yet was recognizing the hard drive as being connected (in BIOS and on initial startup screen showing it as the primary master). Any ideas on what might be causing this or what I could do? I can't find my Win ME system disk either...

hello remove your new ram and put back in the old one. the new one must be incompatable.

Nope, I tried that last night...It did the same thing... And I'm pretty sure I bought the right RAM as well...The original RAM said "128 mb Syn DIMM 133 MHz" on it and the new RAM was 256 mb SDRAM PC133...Those are the same, right?

Sounds like you pulled a cable loose on the disk drive, while you were inserting the memory. And the the boot record on the disk driver is damaged. Download the free memory tests DocMemory_v2.0 and MemTest86_v3.0 and make their boot diskettes. Use them to boot the system and test the memory. It can take hours to run. Let Memtest86 run over night. If memory passes tests OK, leave the memory in and work on the disk boot problem. Make a Windows ME boot diskette if you do not have one. Boot the system with it and see if you can access the disk drive with a DOS DIR command. If you can, then run the FDISK /mbr command, to replace the Master Boot Record on the disk drive.

Hi Bryan. I would suggest to try booting up with only the new ram installed just in case the two are not compatible. You may have to try other brands too...motherboards have a set frequency range for ram. Here's a link for more info...check the bottom of the page about ram. http://www.viaarena.com/?PageID=77