Wade M.

It's all greek to me, Well damn it, somebody had to say it!

I tried the win bit and it said no. I've already gone out and bought another drive and put XP on it. However, copying everything with the Me dos is not going well. I am only interested in a few directories. Im going to try xxcopy next, it looks like i'm going to loose the long file names in the process. Anyone know of any good hard disk recovery utils that will run under Xp and recover these files that only the dos on Me can see. Thanks, Wade

The saga continues!! I found today that if I boot with the origional Win Me CD, I can get to DOS prompt. It is here only that I can see the files on the origional hard drive. I believe it is FAT 32 which XP totally ignores when looking from another frive. Even though XP was using the same drive when it went down. Perhaps this is the key, ccleaner did something in error because this was an Me with XP installed overtop of it. I experimented with copying files to floppy, I don't think so!! chkdsk from the Me boot reports a problem with a cluster in the FAT and will not run or continue.

Good People: Thank you all for your remarks and thoughts, I can provide a bit more info: The machine was born as windows Me and I upgraded to XP about a year ago. XP was also carrying a lot of the original garbage that was under Me. About two weeks ago I ran cleaner with no problems. The machine was very slow and sluggish but very stable. Last weekend I ran Issues, (making sure not to let it process file associations, something I highly reccomend to everyone running cleaner not to do, it has killed working file associations on every machine I've run it on). If I try to boot from the HD it brings up the windows loading screen with the chasing light bar, it then flashes for about .5 seconds an error screen that looks similar to the one you get when you cut power without shutting down windows. I've tried every trick to hold it or print it with no luck. It then goes to the screen with "boot in safe mode" "boot in safe with network" "boot in safe mode with driver selection" I forget the wording, the one that allows you to approve each driver being loaded, which does not work. "last known good configuration" "boot normally" Each one does exactlly the same thing, the windows loading screen, then a blank screen, then I believe the CMOS puts up in the top right F2 for setup, F12 to choose a boot device. If I boot from XP cd and I choose the repair console, aka the dos prompt, I do see a more advancd set of dos tools, help, chkdsk, fixboot, fdisk, etc-. I can also navigate the the hard drive and see all the files. If I chose to install XP from the same XP disk (hoping it will leave the files like favorites, WAB and etc alone, a process I have done in the past) it claims that the drive is not formatted, "would I like to format it first" If I put and good HD in the machine as the master and set the origional drive as a slave on the same IDE cable, boot it to XP, it again claims the drive is not formatted. Ok, thanks again, got to get to work and look busy, may think of something more on the way. Wade

First, thanks for the reply. However, I have no idea if I can copy or merge the backup copy of the reg to some location that will allow it to boot properly. The cc****.reg file seemed as if it would do this on it's own when under the running windows environment. Since ccleaner took away my ability to get there, the big question is how to restore it with out windows running. Anyone know of any third party software that self boots and will help diagnose what is wrong. The only sure way out of this I know of is to go buy another hard drive reinstall XP and, add in the origional drive to copy across favorites, emails address books etc. Thanks, Wade

I ran the Issues operation, rebooted and now I'm stuck. 3 year old Dell machine, was Win Me, bought and installed XP W/SP2 last year. Ran Issues with no other changes to system, upon reboot I got- "Win did not start properly---- Boot in safe mode Boot in safe mode with CD Last known good config" etc-" Every option brings me back to this same screen. If I hit F12 at one point, I can boot from the origional XP cd and get to repair console, I can even navigate the hard drive and see the cc_200~1.reg file but I don't know how to use it to undo what was done. Can anyone please advise what I could try next. Is bootfix.exe an option I could use? Trying to save my skin here, any help would be greatly appreciated! Thanks, Wade