Windows ME not booting at all

two days ago, my computer booted normally. yesterday, i went to turn it on, and nothing past the wallpaper. no icons, no nothing. the system just stalls with the infamous hourglass. i tried booting from ME floppy disk, and nothing, tried to do a system restore from the disk, and the i am told the scanreg /restore is an invalid file. looking at the dir of the floppy, no scanreg is found at all. from the command prompt, when i change diectories to the C: drive, i can't see the windows directory.

i am running a gateway system with ME, so all i have is the gateway restoral disk, but i am afraid that i will have to reformat my drive, somwthing that i don't want to do.

 

Why not use System Restore to return to an operating state.
How to Restore in Dos
Use Method 2 to restore just the registry

 

I have same problem with one of my old hp pcs it was pronouced dead a few months ago. Short of a miracle nothing was going to work. I couldnt get into anything on it. The cd drive wouldnt even pick up a cd for me to use the recovery disk. Good luck with yours though, hope it isnt as bad as mine was.

 

i would love to try, but i cannot boot into windows. when i boot with the startup disk, and go to the C:\ drive, there is no windows directory.

think i'm pretty much up a creek.

 

Those letters in blue type are links to a webpage telling you how to do it from dos, step by step.

 

as i said in my previous post, i cannot find a windows directory. when i type
edit C:\windows\system.ini, i am told that it is a bad command. when i type dir, there is no windows directory to do anything.



any other ideas???????

 

It seems Edit.Com is missing, and Scanreg.Exe is missing. No telling what else is, sounds like either the drive is taking a dive, or a virus delivered it's payload.
I would use the recovery disk and let it format the drive.

 

what you have not seen is that windows still starts. it hangs at the background, so it appears that windows is still there, but i tend to believe you that a virus has infected me. i am trying to reformat my secondary drive and see what i can recover from the bad one. wish me luck, thanks.