Here's the deal.  I'm working on a friends computer running Windows ME.  When booting 
up to desktop, the start button won't work and other problems.  So I slave the hard 
drive to mine and run virus scan using Nortons.  It only has 2gb used space on drive, 
after 6 hours of scanning, still not done.  I stop the scan and view the report and 
it says that it has 5 boot records with one master boot record.  Whats the deal? 
 I've been watching it scan and every so often it will add a "\" between "windows" 
and "option" in the directory tree but if I go to the windows folder I don't see 
any problems.  Whats causing this?  Does it need to be formatted and reinstalled 
again? Safe mode don't even work properly.

Tip: Run a free scan for common Windows errors ad

re: Boot records Thursday, February 23, 2006 at 4:14 pm Posted by Jack Gulley (5917 messages posted) Run ScanDisk in Thorough mode on the disk drive to make sure there are not read errors on the disk drive. They will slow things down a lot and "hang" the system for minutes at a time. It might be best to boot with a Windows ME Startup diskette and run the DOS version of SCANDISK C: as you can tell better what it is doing. Power failures and just shutting off the power while the system is writing to the disk drive can cause errors of sector headers/trailers. ScanDisk can repair or bypass some of these. If it finds errors that it can not recover from in files, make careful note of the exact path and fill file name so you can replace them later. It fixes those by replacing the damaged part with all zeros. There are copies of most of Windows ME program files in its system CAB files. However, if the System CAB files themselves are corrupted, they can be replaced from a Windows ME install CD. The \Windows\Options folder has two folders in it where the system CAB (install) files are kept. They are quite large Cabinet files and it can take an AV scanner quite some time to open them, decompress the files and scan them. However, anything over an hour indicates something else wrong. [Reply or follow-up to this message] Tip: Use one of the [Reply or follow-up to this message] links above to add a message to this thread Search this forum Start a new thread on a different subject Report abuse of the forum Return to the Windows Me Discussion Forum