Hello,

I'm refurbishing an old Gateway for a friend, which came with ME. Recovery CDs are not available. A boot disk from bootdisk.com lets me run Win ME chkdsk, and the results are pretty terrible. Assuming the license travels with the motherboard and not the hard drive, I can legally put ME back on a fresh drive, right?

(I don't know why Gateway chose "partition type 44" for this 20 GB drive, instead of "FAT32 LBA" [0b or 0c IIRC]. Probably something to do with their rescue software.)

Strangely, Linux has no problem copying virtually every single file (except \options\cabs\driver6.cab and gobackio.bin). I backed up the drive to two DVD-Rs.

Can I build a reasonable ME CD for this client? I do have access to another ME machine (IBM Aptiva), which probably has driver6.cab. This could also let me run a "file compare" utility to test the integrity of other critical files and cabinet files, especially inside a batch file.

I want to make ONE CD for the original machine only, I think this is within the license rules.

Or should I copy the files to a new drive, type "fdisk/MBR" from an ME boot floppy and see what happens?

Any help is greatly appreciated.

(The machine originally came with Office 2000 as well, but considering all the registry entries and DLLs needed, that is probably beyond my ability.)

If the options\cabs\ directory also contains the install files (setup and co), it will be easier. What sort of cd do you want to make (recovery image or WinME install CD) ?

better off making a Windows ME CD. just do NOT include the msbatch.inf and msbatch.xpr files if you want to perform a custom install of WinME on another computer.