Bought the 2254 as a backup machine from a large catalog reseller. Worked fine until a virus attack forced us to format the hard drive. Now the reformatted drive, and 3 other drives we tried that all have Win Me installed and work FINE in other machines, fail on startup. Process is, start the system, shows IBM logo, then runs normal startup post, goes to the Win Me first screen with all the icons of all programs, and as soon as the post completes and the hourglass clicks off, the machine recycles, back to the IBM logo, etc. This is a full loopback situation and will repeat forever. We suspect that the IBM motherboard BIOS is looking for an IBM signature file on the hard drives, and when it is not found, the system just dumps and restarts. Anyone know if those nefarious wizards at big blue have set us up? More importantly, anyone have the secret code to get past this?

Have you tried using the IBM's "Recovery" partition on the original drive? It's a hidden partition that FDISK and FORMAT do not see and can't access. so it's prolly still there. My Netvista 6270 with Windows ME had a recovery partition, you can access it by pressing F11 at boot time (it will say at the bottom of the BIOS POST screen, "Press F11 to enter recovery mode" or something) This will format the disk, install Windows ME and all the options and software that came with it. Hopefully this will also install their "Secret code". I have tried this and it worked on my NetVistas. HTH

I have ibm netvista 2284. It has the press F11 recovery message on startup. Have been told it cleans off the harddrive and not to use it. Is this true? What else does it do that ME restore doesn't do? I have used that a lot and found it to do a good job when things get messy. Email appreciated. thanks