Computer Question

I would appreciate it if one of you computer smart freepers would answer a question for me. I hate windows ME and have spent all night trying to format my hard drive to get rid of it. Everytime I go to the dos prompt and tell if to format, it tells me the drive is being used and it aborts my command. I copied a start-up disk and tried to boot from that and it still boots to windows!! What am I doing wrong? I searched the net for answers and all the sites give the instructions that I just followed. Any help would be appreciated.

So where do you want to go next?

What do you intend to do with that disk next? If you will be installing some other Operating System (whether later version of Windows or something more radical like Linux), you can probably find a way to just start with the new installation and overwrite what's there.

Of if, grin, you're going to destroy the disk with a hammer, you can do that just fine without erasing the ME bits first.

Or if you really want to give away or sell the disk or something like that, and must first erase it, then you need to boot from a floppy that does something more useful than just booting to Windows ME.

In general, I keep around a partition editor tool for such tasks, such as Powerquests "Partition Magic", or Paragon's "Partition Manager". I've just started using "Partition Manager" -- it's downloadable, a bit simpler (like no fancy undo operations not yet applied) and lower cost. I like it. Previously, I had used Partition Magic for years.

But much depends on what you want to do with this disk next.

You may need to go into your computer setup when it firsts boots (screen usually says F2 or Del to enter setup), look for a boot sequence or boot devices or something like that. You can set it to boot in a certain order, in other words to first look at your hard drive or maybe first look at your cdrom or floppy. Most likely it's hard drive first, you'll need to change it to floppy first, save the settings and exit, reboot, and provided the disk is in the drive it should boot to dos. Hope it helps, good luck. I'd also suggest using a program like Norton's Ghost to take a backup image of your system after you reload it. That way, when you want to do this again you only need to apply the image to your system (5 minutes) vs. formatting and reinstalling.

While the computer is starting up, press F-8 to get to the startup menu. From there, select "command prompt only". At this command prompt the drive will be free of open file handles and you will be able to have your way with it. Just be sure you have your original ME disk if you're going to install an upgrade version of a newer Windows OS.

And beware - if your computer came with ME preinstalled and only has what is called a "restore disk", a Windows upgrade may not recognize it as an original product disk. You might just want to do what others have said, just upgrade right over the top of your existing system.

Dave in Eugene

Glad it worked.

I struggled with an install of WinXP Pro here a while back. My computer is a relic and the tired old CD-ROM drive didn't much like the new XP CD, so I was reading off of my Iomega USB CD-RW drive. But then the XP install would hang because it didn't like some of the hardware in this old PC, including the USB 2.0 card that makes the CD work.

Sometimes one has to be creative mucking around with old junk, so I found an old hard drive laying around and I hooked it up as a slave and copied the CD on to it, pulled the USB card out, and installed XP off the old hard drive lickety-split. Then installed the USB card and Iomega drivers and discovered a conflict with the old ISA Soundblaster card that seemingly didn't matter to Win98, but sure as heck was a big deal to XP. So I pulled the Soundblaster, installed the USB card and Iomega drivers again, then forced an install of the Soundblaster to share an IRQ with the disabled USB 1.0 port on the motherboard, fiddled with the CMOS setup to make work with a stick of PC-100 that had always worked fine with Win98 but suddenly decided it no longer liked the default settings, and all is hunky-dory. Spent about three days worth of my spare time (more or less) getting up and running with XP Pro.

And that was all just to try it, because I was sure as heck I wasn't going to like it and would ultimately revert back to Win2K or something like that. Was I ever wrong. After all the trouble, XP is working slicker than snot here, and it has features I don't know how I ever lived without. And since May when I installed it my computer has locked up exactly one time. I must say I am pleasantly surprised.

Dave in Eugene

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