**I placed this in the ME forum as my friend has indeed XP Pro but is indeed going to Win ME. My friend can't stand XP. Need to install Win ME for him on above system. Have a few questions though regarding the installation. Under normal circumstands with 95/98/ME u can use a boot disk to fdisk and format and reinstall the operating system. Rumor has it, u can't use a boot disk to boot with XP, so my question is how would one install Windows ME on a system currently running XP Pro fat 32 installation without using a boot disk!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! to fdisk and format. Confused in the Big Easy!!!!!! Any help appreciated. Thanks.

Hi Xena...warrior princess. ;) XP Pro's cd-rom disc installs using a bootable cd-rom. ME's cd-rom disc installs using a bootable floppy disk. So you would have to make sure you have a ME boot disk handy and also that your floppy disk is bootable. Check in your bios and make sure that the floppy disk boots up before the cd-rom and harddrive does. -good luck

Success or otherwise with fdisk on a bootfloppy will depend on whether the HDD is partitioned/formatted in fat32 or ntfs. If it only has one partition then FDISK will be able to delete and re-create a partition without difficulty. If the drive is formatted in NTFS and has more than one partition then FDISK may not be able to do the job. I believe a prog called delpart can be found to do the job.

Hi Xena, I can't stand the xp either, rather than loading wme, you can change the face of xp to look like me or 98. Go to start- control panel, appearance, display and under windows, highlight classic windows. I am not sure this is what you are looking for, but, it is an option, HTH frank

Hmmm...interesting. With all the misguided abuse ME gets, I would be interested to know what it is in XP that has persuaded the user to return to ME. I still run many systems on ME and have no significant problems with it. When you install it, visit the homepage link on this response, though I think you already know about it. :-)

I agree with Frank (post # 3)...I didn't care for WinXPs interface either, but learned the tricks to make more like Win9x/ME. I'd try these before going thru the hassle of formatting & reinstalling...that can take hours...& that's not including getting online & downloading all the critical updates from Microsoft...plus the updates for your antivirus, device drivers, etc...add to that any additional programs that need to be reinstalled & you've got a lot of work ahead of you! WinXP is here to stay...might as well learn to deal with it. Check this post...responses # 4 & 5: http://computing.net/windowsxp/wwwboard/forum/76581.html

Thanks everyone, the response was quick and quite interesting. I had never known about changing the look of XP, thanks. Also I have never uninstalled XP going down to ME. It was installed fat 32 and not NTFS. Although, I have always been curious about removing NTFS partisions if the need arose and have never dealth with same. The user had 98SE before, liked the look and 98SE ran more games and such!!! And I think the kids understood 98SE better. I installed XP Pro for them to get the feel of which operating system they like, they want to try Win ME. I had some quirky problems with ME, my Compaq Presario came with ME and found a lot of my components - Win TV card at time would not work with XP, although drivers are usually available to alleviate this problem and make these work within XP. I alternate between the operating systems, with my drive divided into C/D/E/F/G, H and I being CDROM and burner. I ghost the images and put the ghost images of the operating system back on C when I need it. **But shame on me I need to do the long way as probably would have had experience with this type of XP to ME problem, again shame on me. I have 98SE on mine now, but will go to XP soon, sometimes we like our old tried and true dinasours. I have also yet to do the ME tweaks, but that is on the agenda too, got the info from the forum to tweak. Thanx!!!!