Windows ME won't boot

[WJWheels]

I'v got a PC that won't boot to WinME. Whether it's a normal or safe mode startup, it gets to the colorful Windows ME screen and just stays there. It doesn't completely hang as the drive is running and the blue line at the bottom of the screen is still moving left to right.

I've tried re-installing the OS from the Windows\Option\Cab files and also tried reinstalling using another WinMe CD. I've also tried "Fdisk /mbr" and it didn't help.

Any suggestions?

[Cricket]

Try removing anything not essential to the computer to boot up (NIC, soundcard, CD-ROM, CD-RW, etc...) and see if the situation improves. Sounds like something is defective.

Cricket

[yellohut]

press "escape" when that is doing that, see what it says.
I have seen this before, it took half an hour for the OS to load.
Have you recently installed any new software or updated anything like an AV program (norton?) The first time I saw this it was after updating Norton, I got an error message that said somehting like "cannot update %1 from %1" or something like that.
just let me know what it says when you press 'escape' during loading. if you see something like that just let it sit cuz it'll be a while, but it'll load eventually.

[WJWheels]

Good thought.... I'll do that. The dude was trying to install a scanner & sw when it manifested itself. Thanks.

I get a message when trying to reinstall windows... on the first restart "Windows could not upgrade the file %1 from %2" or something along those lines.

[yellohut]

that's the message I was talking about...
check out this site:
http://support.microsoft.com/default...;en-us;q283069

it describes your problem and what to do about it.
but what wound up working best for me was i just let it sit until it loaded completely, which i would let sit for at least an hour before calling it quits. then you can follow their instructions to fix it.