Hi John and   one of our resident "Techies" should be along around lunchtime and may be able to help you, in the meantime, can you let us know what Operating System you are using  

Is your PC a  "white box" type PC ie: big brand supplied by the  likes of Curries/PC World? Are you trying to reinstall using their supplied rescue disks [two usually] containing OS and progs. Is it the original Hard Drive, or a different one?

Go to this site http://www.belarc.com/free_download.html and download the free program [it's only small] and run it, and post the hardware results here. It list's all the components on your PC.....motherboard, CPU, memory etc. it will help in the diagnosis, plus your possible upgrade to XP.

By the way ME is crap, sooner you bin it the better.


And don't worry about posting the results of Belarc on the site, it wont tell us if you subscribe to the "spankers Weekly Website"

Here's my system info from running the program

Operating System         System Model
Windows 2000 Professional Service Pack 4 (build 2195)         MSI MS-6380E 1.0
Processor a         Main Circuit Board b
1666 megahertz AMD Athlon XP
128 kilobyte primary memory cache
256 kilobyte secondary memory cache         Board: MSI MS-6380E 1.0
Bus Clock: 133 megahertz
BIOS: American Megatrends Inc. 07.00T 04/02/01
Drives         Memory Modules c,d - Buy More
70.80 Gigabytes Usable Hard Drive Capacity
54.56 Gigabytes Hard Drive Free Space

LITE-ON LTR-32123S [CD-ROM drive]
SAMSUNG DVD-ROM SD-616T [CD-ROM drive]
3.5" format removeable media [Floppy drive]

Maxtor 6E030L0 [Hard drive] (30.75 GB) -- drive 0
SAMSUNG SP0411N [Hard drive] (40.06 GB) -- drive 1         512 Megabytes Installed Memory

Slot '0' has 512 MB
Slot '1' is Empty
Slot '2' is Empty
     Local Drive Volumes
     
     
c: (on drive 0)    7.34 GB    4.44 GB free
d: (on drive 1)    7.34 GB    4.50 GB free
e: (on drive 0)    3.15 GB    3.13 GB free
f: (on drive 0)    18.63 GB    18.56 GB free
g: (on drive 0)    1.63 GB    1.61 GB free
h: (on drive 1)    3.15 GB    2.68 GB free
i: (on drive 1)    18.64 GB    16.23 GB free
j: (on drive 1)    9.30 GB    2.60 GB free
k: (on drive 1)    1.63 GB    806 MB free
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Nothing wrong with spankers weekly

my M.E. disk is an original, and i have reformated using it before, but now after running format c:/, it runs through the format, verifies it then i go to E:setup, that kicks off and runs through that blue box with all the checks in, then i get a message saying now checking sysreg (or something similar) and it just hangs, even if i leave it for an hour and come back i still have the "checking sysreg" dialouge, and no progress. i really need help to resolve this as im desperately missing spankers weekly.

It sounds like it hasnt formatted fully John.
If you only have one partition (C), which you appear to have seeing as you would reinstall using setup E, then I would download the DiscWizard Starter Edition from here :

http://www.seagate.com/support/disc/drivers/discwiz.html

Its a fee program and will work with your maxtor drive for the zero fill part only, but thats the bit you need.
You will need to put it on 2 floppys, hopefully you can do this from your work pc.
This will totally wipe all your hard drive if you select the "Zero Fill" option, choose the full one not the quick one, and it will write a zero to every part of the hard drive.
It can take a couple of hours if you have a large drive but at least it should remove all the files that are on your drive and allow you to reinstall ME or XP, whichever you decide to use.  

all you'v done is wiped everything off the hard drive, people do that all the time without any problems. it's just like you deleting a file from windows.

Sorry John, you wont be able to run Belerac untill  you have a working OS on your PC, what was I thinking about. It was your OS upgrade enquiry that lead me to Belarc. Dont ask me two questions at once ...........I'm easly confused

please tell me that i havent totally screwed my computer and a) lost a computer and b)lost £200?

Don't panic, look at it this way, after zeroing your Hard Drive. You could liken it to having a nice clean plate on which to pile your choice of OS on it. Either that or your Hard Drives nackered   Better still you ME disk is nackered, then you could install a decent OS and live happly ever after.