i am trying to solve a problem on a computer with ME but i am about 1000km from the actual computer and having to pass instructions orally down a phone line. When it starts up if gives a blue screen of death and instructions to reinstall windows. Safe mode doesnt load - it gives an error about a missing shlwapi.dll file. Booting from a floppy gives me access to a dos prompt, but when i try to access the windows system folder i get a 'data error'. So i cant replace the dll (and i'm sure its only a symptom, not the cause). My guess (i'm not an expert) was that the hard drive is damaged (someone moved the computer when it was on). So i ran scandisk from the dos prompt. But after scanning about 3% of the disk it hangs (and won't respond to the 'quit' or 'see more' command). So my diagnosis is that the hdd is damaged- am i correct and what is the best way to proceed. Can i rescue any data from the drive, and if so, how?

That does sound like a damaged disk drive. When the DOS SCANDISK program hits a damage area, it goes into error recovery trying to fix the bad clusters by reading them many times and then re-writing and testing them again. This can take a very along time to cross a damaged area and during this time the program will not respond to keyboard/mouse actions. You just have to let it run. You can try just letting it run, but it may take hours just to recover from a small damaged area of the disk. Try it over night any way. By now, the data in the damaged area would not be recoverable anyway. And at the 3% mark you can be sure that this damaged area is in an area full of directory (folder) entries and critical system files. Most of which would now be corrupted and unusable even if Scandisk can "recover" the directory table entries and files and write them elsewhere. Scandisk handles clusters that it can not read by marking the area BAD and creating an alternate cluster that is filled with zeros. If this happens in a program or data file, the program is corrupted and useless. If it happens in a directory entry, all the programs listed in the directory entry become "lost chains" and are gone. So consider the Windows ME OS toast on that drive and work on recovery of any critical data files that might be on the system (to diskette). Then you can try the disk drive manufactures standalone disk analysis tool to see if it can recover use of the drive. But once a disk is damaged in this way, the damaged area will spread and the disk drive will slowly become useless over time. So work on locating a replacement drive for the system and starting over with a clean install of the OS. Not something you can do over the phone.