My dad has an old IBM P3 that has Win ME on it and it stalls at the start up screen. When you turn it on th PC does it's thing until it gets to the ME screen then just stops responding. I have started it in safe mode and tryed several times to do a system restore but that fails once it gets to the start up screen again and I'm forced to hit alt,ctrl,del to get it to reboot. I have also try selective start ups to try and see wether it is a program in the start up that is causing the problem but no matter what I try it just won't reload past the win me screen. I did notice that last week windows installed service pac 4 so I'm asuming that that may have a problem with it but I'm unsure of how to remove that part of windows.
It is starting to really peeve me off. Could any one please help with this anoying problem.

I've just dealt with one of those and it was a real challenge. It only had 64mb of memory in it so I had to add more memory just to get it to boot into safe mode. Then I removed as many programs as I could to free up more memory. After that I installed Avast antivirus to remove several trojans. It worked very well and got rid of them all. Then I used as WinME boot floppy and got into the _restore\temp folder and removed all the old restore points, several hundred mb of them.

attrib -r -s -h C:\-restore\temp\*.cpy

followed by

del C:\_restore\temp\*.cpy

Then I ran scandisk in the dos mode, which is faster but still took several hours, and had to be done before you could run the defragmenter. After that I rebooted into Windows and ran the defragmenter.

If you can get into safe mode now you may not need to add memory, but if you have any around it wouldn't hurt to add it.

Thanks for the reply. I have decided that I will reinstall windows but my dad has some photos on the hard drive that he wants to keep but I can't burn them to disc in safe mode. So I wanted to hook my pc up to dad's and transfer the pics to my hard drive. Dad's pc has a ethernet slot in the back but mine doesn't but I have and external broadband modem which does. So can I hook dad's pc to the modem which is to my pc and transfer files between the two?

A better idea would be to hook your Dad's HD to yours as a slave.

That is a good idea why didn't I think of that. As I already have three hard drives in mine pc if I hook his up mine should just read it as slave three ? is that right or will I have to put one of those little plastic plugs in the back to identify which hd it is?

Depends on age of drive, cables, and how you have it cabled. You can try with the jumper as cable select. If that does not work, then jumpered as slave.

Don't beat yourself up over it. As humans, we have to have the philosopy that we continue to learn till the day we die. We can't think of everything all the time.

Well I added the drive to my pc but I'm running xp on ntfs and I think the drive from ME must be fat 32 as it keeps saying that the drve hasn't been formated and do I want to do it. But if I format it then I'll loose the pics dad wants and it has all been a waist of time. Any other ideas?

NTFS will read Fat, Fat16, and Fat 32.
I am not sure why you are getting that its not formatted. I am doing some research on it, but maybe someone else will respond and have an answer.

Thanks 123. yeah I thought that NTFS would read Fat32 also but it just keeps saying that it isn't formated and do I want to do it. I put the HD back in to the ibm and it started again in safe mode but once again when trying to start it normaly it gets to the ME screen and won't go any further.
Any help on this matter would be greatly appreciated.

Well I got a Computer Tech over hear yesterday to try to solve the problem. After a few tries he found that the HD is fried and for some reason will start in safe mode but not normaly and that is what explaines the message of the drive needing a format when XP tried to read it. He reformated a notepad HD to Fat32 and installed it then in safe mode copied the files my dad wanted saved and then transfered them to my PC so could burn them to disc.