Degraded PC not reading D or E drives

[starbear]

Hello all, first posting here so not all sure where to start or post this so please forgive me if this not the correct place.

My PC using ME after startup looks like it is in the safe mode but its not. Folders such as documents and pictures CAN be opened but at greatly reduced quality in appearance. There are numerous error messages such as Rundll has caused an error in MMSYSTEM.DLL and Helpctr has caused an error in KERNEL32.DLL (in safe mode)  In My Computer the "D" drive is not always displayed and even when it is displayed it does not read disks properly and says they are empty and that includes the restore disk.

Just occasionaly it will read the restore disk but say it is not the correct configuration and so cannot be used on that PC! The "E" drive is never displayed now and I cannot connect to internet as AOL not recognised or displays error messages.

Additonally  when running Scandisk on the C drive it stops and displays message saying it has restarted 10 times but cannot proceed as some windows or other programme is writing to the disk.

All of this appeared to start after a visit from my son who downloaded some long overdue MS updates. After the problem commenced I checked out the updates with my laptop and read about one update that itself created errors caused some PCs to crash. I tried to remove any traces of that update but not sure if I was successful or even if this was the problem in the first place as that particular update had been corrected by later ones.

HELP........please.

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Topic moved from FAQ Solution Database to Microsoft Windows board.

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[Rob Pomeroy]

Sounds like you need to reinstall, unfortunately.  Personally, I would either downgrade to Windows 98SE (the licence for Windows ME entitles you to use an earlier version instead) or upgrade to XP.  In the latter case, you'll need to be sure that (A) your computer can handle it and (B) you don't lose any important data.

Whatever you do, best to avoid Win ME like the plague.