I don't mean to discredit Ed for all his help, but you don't even have an ME installation 
disk do you? There's no point in going through those steps, if you have no OS to 
install. Plus, once you wipe everything out, there's no way to retrieve your original 
product key. 

Normally mfgrs. do not provide anything but a set of restore disks, so you can restore 
a system back to factory state, i.e. as it was when you first purchased it. Those 
are only for that particular system. 

You haven't said where you got the boot disk from. Was  it one you had lying around, 
or did you download an image and create one? 

This is the one you should use. If that fails, then you know it's not the boot disk. 

Windows Me OEM 
http://www.bootdisk.com/bootdisk.htm
 

Blocking Unwanted Parasites with a Hosts File