Installing Win ME and getting errors

[Moliere]

I had to format my hard drive and try a fresh install of Win ME. I used the emergency boot floppy disk to give me the temporary D drive along with enabling my CDrom E drive. In the past I always just ran the setup.exe off the CDrom and let it install onto the newly formatted C drive. For some reason I keep getting strange errors like not enough Extended Memory. Does this have something to do with a bad hard drive or bad RAM chips? Should I reset the RAM chips?

[Swordfish]

Have you tried running setup with /im switch?

/im switch causes Setup to skip the RAM check.

syntax : setup /im

[Midknyte]

running the setup off of cd? I never do that.

copy the win9x folder to the hdd and run setup from there.

[rraehal]

It sounds to me like your bootdisk is not working correctly.

I would boot from the CD with WindowsME. That should eliminate your problem.

Not enought extended memory would be a result of the HIMEM.SYS file not loading at boot. I don't think ME require EMM386 to install but if it does this file could cause the problem too.

If you can not boot from CD, I would go to www.bootdisk.com and downlaod and create a Windows ME startup disk and try with the new disk.

I agree copy the Win9x folder from the CDROM to the hard disk is a good idea. Windows will not ask you to insert the CD when installing things after WinME is setup.

[Moliere]

Thanks for all your advice. I will give it a try tonight.

[Moliere]

Here are the exact error messages.

When I tried to run the install from the CDrom like I have always done in the past I get this error message before it ever tries to start Scandisk:
Standard Mode: Invalid DPMI return from 039F:0936

This happens whether I run setup /im or just setup.

When I copied all of the files onto the C drive and run setup I get this message during the Scandisk process:

"There is not enough free conventional memory to check a drive." It then kicks me out of Scandisk and has this message in DOS: "Not enough free Extended/XMS memory to run setup". This happens whether I run setup /im or just setup.

Any more ideas?

[Swordfish]

Try this, get hold of a Win98 bootdisk

Boot from that disk, when you are on the A: prompt, do a system transfer on to C:

A:\> sys a: c:

Now remove the floppy, reboot the system, the system will directly go into DOS. You will get a C:\ prompt.

Go to the folder where you copied the Winme setup files and start the setup normally.

Get the boot disk either from www.bootdisk.com or from following sites:

http://support.mpccorp.com/downloads/boot.html

http://www.nerdlabs.org/bootdisks/index.php

http://www.svrops.com/svrops/dwnlddisk.htm

[Moliere]

I did a search for DPMI on this Message Board and found an old message (1999) that referenced this problem. I ran setup with /is and /im to avoid the scandisk and memory search. This seemed to fix the problem because WinMe installed with no other problems. Of course, I don't know if this means there is a problem with the hardware that I will find out about latter. Oh well, it's not my computer anyway (sister in-law's). Thanks for all your help!

[dell8200]

put win 2000pro on if you have it, win2000pro is much better and stable than "ME"