Any other suggestions?

Bruce,

I'm sorry but I don't think I am going to be able to help. The error you
mention is in neither the public nor confidential partners knowledge base
so all I can suggest is that you contact the OEM concerned, presumably
Magnell who I have never heard of before today, and see if they can help.

One possible reason for your problem is that the recovery CD is locked to
a specific version of the bios so you may want to consider rolling back or
reinstalling the previous version. The protection you mention is
something OEMs, that is computer manufacturer's, may or may not implement
and it is the OEMs who produce the recovery CDs rather than Microsoft.
You mention also that you replaced your hard disk. Whilst I don't think
the fact that this has changed is likely to be the cause of the problem it
is possible that the recovery CD is baulking when it finds the disk to be
a different size (80GB rather than 40GB). Initially I thought the cluster
size changed when crossing the 64GB boundary but it seems not and that
32KB clusters are used for partitions of 32GB or more.
--
Mike Maltby
MS-MVP Windows



Bruce wrote:

I'm sure about the error. I looked at the knowledge base, too, and
did a search on the Microsoft site and found nothing.

I have a MAGNELL Recovery CD and a floppy disk that says Windows ME
ESD111500. Both came with the computer.

There are a couple of reasons that I want to reinstall Windows ME
before XP. The first is like you mentioned, my recovery CD has
Windows ME. Another is that the software that came with the computer
is on the MAGNELL disk, too, and I have no way of knowing how to pull
out the programs that I want. Three years ago when I had to format
the drive, I just reinstalled everything and uninstalled the software
that I didn't want before adding the software that I purchased. It
worked okay then, but I had not upgraded the BIOS and I had not put
in the larger HDD or added the memory.

I read something on the internet about a protection that Microsoft
built into the version of Windows that manufacturers used that caused
it to fail to install if any components had been changed from the
original configuration. Would this be what is hanging me? How do I
get around it?

I can and will pull the extra memory until I get everything back.

Any other suggestions?