I plugged in an external hard drive into my laptop (via USB) and it launched the add new hardware function but froze. When I restarted all the devices has been lost: no CD/DVD, display is at lowest settings, etc... nothing is listed in the device manager except the network card and floppy drive. No programs launch and I can't create a WinMe boot disk from the add/remove software. I have downloaded a boot file from BootDisk.com but haven't yet had access to another PC to copy it to a floppy to boot from. I can boot from a floppy (I tried a Win98 boot disk) and it appears that it will read the CD when booting up from the floppy. I have all the restore CDs for the laptop, but when I try to launch the restore CD ( D:/runmenu.exe) it says that the program will only run under win32. Would it be possible to install Win98 and then pop in the WinMe restore disc and start over? Or maybe I should go buy WinXP and try a brand new install after performing an Fdisk?

"but haven't yet had access to another PC to copy it to a floppy to boot from." You don't copy the downloaded file, you run it from Windows first to create the boot diskette. Don't know about your particular 'restore disks' - but you might try (from a WinME boot) rolling back the registry with: scanreg /restore You might be able to perform a Windows System Restore I can't see how installing Win98 would be helpful, and, if you want to switch to WinXP, do so Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former.

Maybe ther's a 16 bit exe on the CD. Try this: dir /s d:\*.exe M2 If at first you don't succeed, you're about average.

scanreg /fix