Need to use a boot disk but not sure what to do next.

Hi I am having major problems. Not sure what the heck happened but in the middle of surfing the web my computer crashed and has been inoperable since last Sunday.

Tried rebooting, several times. Nothing. It even went into safemode. But still no go. Now when I turn it on it asks for a boot disk. Which we have from bootdisk.com.......W ME, OEM.

Currently my CD rom isn't responding to anything at this point. I did several years ago replaced the original cdrom/dvd for a burner. Should I change it back to the original cdrom before proceeding with any action?

My c: drive is not working so what does that mean? I have tons of photos that I'm afraid has been eaten up in the c: drive. Is there any hope? Yeah, I took a very bad risk in doing that but I learned my lesson.

I tried doing a scandisk of my c: and I get an invalid response. Forgot exactly what it said.

Ok, so I went ahead and put the new bootdisk into the drive, it does it's thing and now I'm at the a: again. I then tried to put in a cd I had of Windows 2000 small business that I had, nothing. I tried putting in the Reinstallation CD that came with my Dell and nothing. Am I doing something wrong?

Help, all I want are my photos!

 

Hello BeaV1969,

What you can try to do is rolling the system back:

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;279736

Unfortunately, you'll need a Me startup disk which is a FLOPPY (the A:\ prompt) - not a cdrom. When you get up and running, generate one from your own system - go into Help&Support to find out how.

What you can try, since you have a boot disk on cd is to get into the BIOS and change the primary boot device to cdrom - currently its the floppy. On bootup, tap the delete key or the F11 key or whatever your system requires - my system is a Dell and its the delete key. The info should be in the manual.

If that doesn't work, one of two ways to get a boot floppy: do you know anyone that is running ME - they can either give you one or generate one from a working system - don't remember where in the Control Panel that option is but the info can be had in Help&Support on the system. The other way is to download it to a floppy from the site you mentioned.

And of course there is always the possibility that the problem is a hardware failure - disk drives do drop dead. The fact that you switched out the original cdrom for a burner IMO shouldn't be a problem.

If nothing works, and provided that the drive is ok, you can install your drive as a secondary drive on a working system. That system will treat your drive as another data drive.

Regards - Charles

 

Thanks so much for the help. I'll give it a shot.

Have a great day!