windows me crash

[dtrum]

I have a sony laptop with windows me and no recovery disks. when i try to turn on I get the sony loge then it goes through a bunch of loading stuff but crashes as soon as the window page loads to the screen. Usually goes then to a blue screen and says to run scanreg/fix. I don't have such an animal. The last time I tried to start it locked up at the window screen and across the top it says your program caused a divide overflow error. If the program persists, contact your program vendor. My daughter was using machine to watch dvd mostly. I am not too familiar with pc based software. I mostly use macs. I check the bios and reset to defaultys. I tried to reboot using disk from bootdisk.com but system will not responde to disk in drive. give error. could it be that because i loaded boot disk from the internet using my mac that because of this the disk is unreadable?. Any help would be appreciated. Any ideas on where to acquire copies of the original disks for this machine Sony PCG-F630? thanks dtrum

[GretaP]

Hi dtrum

When you created the startup disk from bootdisk.com, did you d/load the file directly to a floppy disk or simply copy the d/loaded file to a floppy disk? If so, then that is why the disk is unreadable during bootup.......to create the startup floppy disk you have to d/load the file to hard drive, then execute the file by double-clicking on it in order to create the startup disk. Whether that process can be done on a Mac, I don't know. If not, see if you can find use of a PC, d/load the file for Windows Me OEM from here, put a formatted floppy disk in the drive, then double-click on the d/loaded file in order to create the Windows ME startup disk. Boot the laptop from the startup disk (you may have to enter BIOS Setup in order to ensure that floppy drive is the first boot device), choose item #4 "Minimal Boot". At the A: prompt, key in the following:

scanreg /fix
<ENTER>
(NOTE: Some machines accept the command without a space between the g and the / but there are other that won't accept the command if the space is not present)

[dtrum]

Thanks for the input. I gave a quick try and I can not open the file on my mac. I will have to use a pc to make the start up disk. Thanks again for the help. I also found copies of the original disk for this machine and should get those in a day or two. Hopefully that will get me up and going again. Always keep your ORIGINAL DISKC!!!!!

[GretaP]

You're welcome. Let us know how you fare once you receive the original disk(s) for the laptop.