Windows wont boot- what files to replace?

[Thrasher]

Yesterday my laptop Insiron 3800 running windows ME decided that it would not boot up. When I turn it on, it gets to the windows logo and then loads the desktop background color. At this point, I get an error saying "Kernel32 has caused an error in 'unknown' and will now close" So I click OK and then nothing else happens. The mouse is still responsive I can do ctrl-alt-del, other than this nothing else is responsive. Interestingly, I left it like this for a while and when I came back, it was playing the screensaver from my pictures folder, which indicates that something seems to be running.

The internal CD drive does not work and I do not have a boot floppy. The BIOS does not allow booting from my USB CD drive. So basically I don't have away to boot it up. The only other computer I have is a macintosh which I am using now.

What I decided to do is go and buy a usb drive enclosure so I can plug the laptop drive into my mac and transfer the all my documents and stuff.

my question is, can I manually replace some of the system files on the drive by putting the windows install CD in my mac and then moving the files on to the drive, replacing the old corrupt files? And which files or folders do I want to replace?

Any help is appreciated

[argatoga]

What you can do is copy the windows install folder off the ME cd, (I don't recall the name off the top of my head), onto the laptop harddrive from your Mac, then (after restoring the harddrive into the laptop) press F8 before the windows boot logo displays. There should be an option to do a minimal boot into DOS. Navigate to where you placed the install files from the cd and run setup.

From setup you should be able to reinstall the OS over the broken one.

[Thrasher]

I believe the problem with this is that microsoft removed the option (or atleast disabled) to start up in DOS mode by using the F8 method. I know that it is possible to use a floppy to startup in DOS mode, but I can't make the floppy without a working computer. I tried downloading the floppy files from the internet on my mac but the all have a .EXE program which formats and makes the floppy, and macs don't run EXE

[MadCow809]

if you can get the run command to work under windows.

then type

format a: /s

it will create a boot disk for you.

but rather use this opportunity to upgrade ME to Win2K or XP. WinME is beyond terrible.

[argatoga]

Try pressing SHIFT + F5 instead of F8.

[Thrasher]

either way, it wont work because real-DOS start up mode is disabled in Windows ME. There is a patch to fix this http://www.geocities.com/mfd4life_2000/ but it needs an actual working computer to run the patch executable. If someone can provide me with the files which have already been patched so Ican just directly replace them it might work.


Also, I was looking at the bootlog.txt and even though I don't know a whole lot about this file or what it means, everything seemed to look normal just by my common sense. However, at the very end it starts to removing "XXXX" removing "YYYYY" and just about every other device what ever that it had previosly loaded. IS this a n indication of a problem or something normal?