Thanks for chipping-in RTS, indeed, I quite agree - subject to CC having
fully satisfied (convinced) himself that he has got a failing HDD. The
important object is to NOT write to, or to read from as little as possible,
the failing disk BEFORE salvaging his (personal) data. Hence my 'Surface
Scan' warning.

However, I suspect that CC may need further advice on (clean) installing
WinMe onto a new HDD.

Mart


"RockyTSquirrel" wrote in message
...
Mart,
my tried and true fix for that kinda failure has always been to get a
new
HD and reinstall ME then use the old drive as a slave, transfer all
"need
to save" data to the new drive then take the old HD and throw it as far
as
I can into the lake...

) its worked everytime I've tried it over the last 10 years...


"Mart" wrote in message
...
From here, your problem would seem to be far more likely associated with
a
'failing hard drive' than with memory issues. WinMe (in both Normal and
Safe
Mode) is trying to load corrupted or damaged files from your hard drive
(HDD) and consequently, failing to boot.

I would suggest you run scandisk c: from your (emergency) startup floppy
disk, but beware!! DO NOT let it do a surface scan (at this stage)
Instead,
just take a note of any/all error reports and report back here. If your
HDD
is failing, you may wish to try to recover your (personal) data before
you
try booting into WinMe again. Somebody will advise you of the next steps.

BTW - You cannot boot into WinMe directly from the startup floppy disk,
it
can only be done from the main system (failing?) HDD (Probably your C:
drive).

Mart



"Chesapeake Chum" Chesapeake wrote in
message ...
I decided to boot my Windows Me from the start-up disk because it would
not
boot normally or in Safe Mode but instead displayed the error
message:"An
I/O
subsystem driver failed to load. Either a file in the .\iosubsystem
subdirectory is corrupt or the system is low on memory. Replace the
disk
and
then press any key." The system has lots of memory available so I
decided
to
boot from the start up disk and select the option to boot with access
to
the
CD drive where I had my Windows ME CD. I thought the corrupted file
could
be
replaced from the original Windows ME CD. Instead, I got another error
message saying cannot find sector Drive C. The option to Retry didn't
work
so
I selected Abort and after that didn't work I selected Fail which, of
course,
didn't help. Any suggestions for what I might do next to get my system
to
boot up? When I try to boot normally it often gets as far as press F3
for
the
configuration utility. But when I press F3 nothing happens.