Hello, I was wondering if someone could help me with Windows ME. I'm actually trying to help my girlfriend's father who lives on the other side of the U.S. Anyway, he has a Dell Inspiron 2500 laptop with Windows ME. He was having a lot of problems with adware, trojans, and so forth. He browsed through the hard drive and deleted some files that he didn't recognize. Unfortunately, he probably deleted some system files by mistake. I have been trying to help him through e-mail and over the phone, but I'm not the most knowledgeable person when it come to Windows ME since I skipped from '98SE to 2000 and XP. I also build my own PC's, so I don't know much about trying to repair PC's that have proprietary hardware and software like Dells, Compaqs, etc. Here is what I have suggested and he tried. I told him to download an ME boot disk from www.bootdisk.com because his Dell Applications CD and his Windows ME CD would not work on boot since it was set to boot from the floppy. After I found out which Inspiron model he had, I was able to look it up and tell him how to change the boot order in the bios. Well, he did that and ME seemed to work, but it stopped. The first time, Scandisk said that it found several damaged files and they needed repaired. Also, the FAT needed repaired. For some reason it wouldn't repair them. It also asked him to insert a floppy if he wanted an undue disk. This didn't work either. He tried again, but this time it wouldn't copy the files from the CD and said that the drive could not be partitioned when it was trying to set up windows. He is wondering if the hard drive is bad. My best guess is that the FAT is damaged and he is going to need to use FDisk to kill the old partition and set up a new one and then reformat the drive. The thing that worries me is that I think Dell and all of the other vendors keep a small partition on the hard drive so that their application and/or restore disks will work. If he repartitions the drive, I'm afraid he may not be able to fix it. Does this sound correct? I don't think the hard drive is physical damaged, but I don't know for sure. It is too bad his PC still isn't under warranty. If that was the case, I would refer him to Dell. If this was a home built PC like mine instead of a Dell or some other proprietary brand name, I would repartition, reformat, ditch ME and install 2000 or XP. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks. Patrick

have to tried doing a " System Restore " ? andy If all else fails, panic

Hi Andy, I'm not sure. I gave him a link on how to do that here http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;[LN];Q279736 . It said you need to make a bootdisk, so I told him to download an ME one from bootdisk.com . That was before I found out what Inspiron model he had. I wasn't able to tell him how to change the boot order to make the CD-Rom without the model number. Anyway, he said the floppy didn't do anything. I wish I could see his computer physically because I could probably fix it. Thanks again. Patrick

The file that he downloaded from bootdisk.com isn't the actual bootdisk itself, it's the program to create a bootdisk. He has to double click on the file & follow the instructions...he will be told to insert a formatted floppy, then the necessary files will be transferred to the floppy disk to make it bootable... Click on "Install Guides" in the column on the left side of this Window....