Windows ME big problem.

[bonestonne]

alright, i looked as far as i could before loosing patience for a previous topic, so if this is just bringing back the dead, sorry.

i went to the dump yesterday, i was looking for a computer slightly bigger and better than what i had for school. so i found one. Its an HP 9720 desktop. the sticker on the front says designed for Windows ME. its got a 1.4 Ghz processor [that i had to replace because the original was quite literally dead]. well, it didn't have a hard drive. at first i thought, no problem, i've got a 40 gig, and a 60 gig at home i can use. well, right now i've got the 40 gig in it, and i'm running Ubuntu Linux 5.10 because when i inserted my Windows XP disk, it said that the system doesn't support that. so i was cool with that, its understandable. i went and i grabbed the Windows ME Emergency Recovery CD (Bootable) Version 1.0

well, it actually got me somewhere, but i have one major problem. none of my sisters or dad know how to install it. i got as far as choose the directory, you know, you get that DOS screen with:

A:/

well, i tried what my older sister did with changing the director, going through the alphabet, cd.* where * is a letter in the alphabet. but i didn't get anywhere. in fact, i got nowhere fast.

does anyone have any knowledge on this? even if i just get ME going i'll be fine and happy. but if im stuck with linux thats cool too. i was just asking because its a very nice computer, 6 PCI slots, 256MB RAM [doesn't seem like much though] and the 1.4 Ghz processor. its got a CD burner, DVD drive, disk drive, sound card, video card, and ethernet card all in it when i pulled it out. all i needed was a hard drive. now that i have the hard drive, i need more help.

thanks in advanced, if you need any more info, just ask, and i'll do what i can to get it. im not exactly the most computer savy, but i managed to get it working somehow right?

[prx984]

well, to change from drive to drive, just type " *: " where * is the drive letter. CD is changing directory.

when you want to start setup, your going to need to make sure your drive is formatted FAT32 because its a 40gb drive and your putting ME on it. youll need to run fdisk and partition it that way and stuff.

if you want, i can help you more in depth on MSN or AIM. just IM me if you need more in depth help because doing this will get to frustraiting posting back and forth, not to mention it will bog up the forum.

hope i can help

-cygnus

[dirtwarrior]

XP should install fine if you set the bios to boot off the cd.

[bonestonne]

well, heres the most current updated situation with it.

after spending an hour installing windows XP onto the 40Gb hard drive, i put it back in. well, XP didn't boot. at all. so i installed Linux again. then i resized the partitions so it would dual boot. works great. heres one for you compu-geniuses:

Windows XP installs as a recovery partition and the actual OS. when the grub boot loader installed, and i got a look at it, the recovery partition and the OS were seperated. with it being like that, would it be possible to run the recovery partition to make XP work?

i want opinions before i do something... bad.

[dirtwarrior]

I dont understand why xp wont install as the main os

[bonestonne]

i don't have the original hard drive, i can't install over anything. i need to do a clean install. without the original hard drive, the computer has nothing to go off of, making almost everything unsupported.

when you install linux next to an operation system, it creates two new partitions. one which is called swap, and it installs a boot program called grub. both of them come with linux, and linux takes over as the main operating system, but Windows [or whatever you started with] is still acessable in a menu.

i do know plenty about computers, its just that i don't have the original hard drive to work with, which is where i loose my smarts.

[prx984]

usually, if you dont have the original drive, you can still get the computer running. unless the manufacturer doesn't have the original drivers on their site.

all you gotta do, is install XP by booting from it, then go from there. XP will load as much as it can as its driver database is huge. all the hardware in my laptop loads, except my wireless nic, and my desktop is the same (not after nLite though, everything loads up now )