Freshly installed ME wont boot

[cls]

Im using a dell dimension 8400,

After years of abuse im trying for a fresh install to clean up all the spyware gathered by the wife and kids. The computer was originally ME upgraded to xp. I still have the upgrade disks but cannot get past the boot up screen. Bios runs and locates the hard drives, it has a 250g and a 320g. The install goes fine and then the loading bar flashes on the screen for an instant and the computer restarts. I tried starting in safe mode with the same results.

Thanks is advance for the help

 

[CompTIA_Rep]

Are you upgrading to XP? If so, you can boot with the XP disk.

 

[cls]

Its only an upgrade disk, and when tried that it says I have no hard drives installed.

 

[CompTIA_Rep]

Thats a different issue. If it cant detect your hard drive, you may need to press F6 during XP setup boot and provide drivers that came with your dell. This requires a floppy disk. This may be indicative of a failed hard drive.

 

[cls]

well the hard drive are not failed, one has the previous instance of xp installed on it, the other has an instance of linux installed both of which will boot and also when i run the ME disk it detects the drives. If i F6 during start up and provide the drivers, will i be able to install a fresh instance of xp with just the upgrade disk?

 

[CompTIA_Rep]

Yes. It will ask you to provide a previous version of a full OS