WinME freezing/not booting

N

naomi

New Member
I'm running WinME on my older desktop and it was just started freezing/not booting up. I press the power button, Compaq appears, this goes away and is replaced by the WinME screen, this goes away and then freezes on a black screen.

I've tried using F8 and accessing the startup options screen but all options freeze at the same spot as above. Normal, logged, safe mode, and step-by-step confirmation....all of them freeze.

There was no hint of a problem occuring beforehand, it just simply decided to freeze one morning.

Any ideas on how I can at least get to a command prompt? (no there is not one listed when pressing F8).

Thanks,
Naomi
 
You can get the Windows ME bootdisk which is simply MS-DOS with CD drive support and more. You will find this bootdisk on many websites, just google it and put it on a floppy.

I think a windows reinstall may make it work.

1. Start the affected computer, press F9 while at the Compaq screen (i have a compaq pc and i know how) and select floppy, after putting the boot disk inside.
2. When prompted, select "Boot with CD-ROM support."
3. Wait until everything needed is loaded
4. In the console write "format C:" and press Enter, but make sure that you are writing on a line where is wrote "A:\>". If you're not, type 'A:' in the console first.
5. Wait the format process to finish, when asked for a label give it one or press Enter if you don't want a label.
6. Put the Windows ME CD in the cd drive.
7. Type in the console the drive letter for the CD-rom drive (if you have only one partition C: that it should be E:, if you have two or more partitions it's the no. of partitions + 1 -th letter in the alphabet. (example: 'E:')
8. Type 'dir' and press enter. You'll see on the CD a folder which contains the windows Me installation files. Type 'cd <foldername>'.
9. Type 'setup' and let it install windows again.
Note: if you need to see a serial file which is on the CD, navigate to it (cd.. to go back, cd <foldername> to go foward, dir <filename> to see files in the folder; if you need to find a file starting with the letter s (just an example) type 'dir s*'). Type then 'type <filename.extension>' (like 'type serial.txt') or use 'edit <filename.extension>'.

If you want only the console you could go just for the first two steps. In the second step, if you don't want to use any CD than select "Boot without CD-ROM support".
 
You, but my old compaq is an intel pentium 2 400 MHz, 128MB RAM and Ati 3D Rage 4MB videocard. It takes about probably an hour to boot the live cd (from the latest version).
 
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