Well when I said reformatting, all I did was boot up from the disk and
reinstalled ME. I thought that cleaned the hard drive off by reloading a
new operating system. The exact msg. is "windows product activation must be
activated with microsoft". What should I do to ensure the hard drive is
completely wiped clean before I reinstall?

"Mike M" wrote:

Something is very wrong if you are saying that you are running Win Me and
it asked you to activate. Win Me does not employ Windows Product
Application so if you are being asked to activate your system then I'm
guessing that you haven't fully removed XP. I'm not quite sure how that
can be the case since you mentioned formatting the disk before
reinstalling Win Me. What exactly was the message when you booted into
Win Me?

The once case that I am aware of where you might be asked to activate a
Microsoft product on Win Me is if you are using a version of Microsoft
Office that includes activation such as Office 2002 which was sold in some
markets (Australia and NZ for two) incorporating WPA.
--
Mike Maltby
MS-MVP Windows



coffeestain wrote:

thank you Mike I will try that. I am using ME on this one and not
XP. I had bought an upgrade to XP but it slowed it down so much I
reformated it and just put the ME back on.