Hi Danny,
You may need to reinstall WinME to its current location unless you use a boot manager that has a swap feature. The problems are occurring for two possible reasons: 1)WinME was installed as "C", but no longer sees itself as "C" and 2) if the WinXP system is using NTFS, then you cannot boot WinME from the NTFS partition.
If the boot partition is using NTFS (which I suspect it is), you need a boot manager. You cannot boot a 9x system from an NTFS partition.
Boot Managers and Partitioning programs:
BootIT NG www.terabyteunlimited.com
Partition Magic www.powerquest.com/partitionmagic
Partition Commander http://www.v-com.com/product/pc_ind.html
Ranish Partition Manager http://www.ranish.com/part/
If the boot partition is using FAT32, then you will need to reinstall WinME so that it sees itself as a different drive letter. When you start it as it is now, it is looking for its system files on C, as that is how it was installed. Of course, it cannot find them there, as C is now the WinXP system. You cannot change all the pointers in the system registry and core system files without reinstalling. See this link from MVP Doug Knox on how to repair the bootloader afterwards (the reinstall will overwrite the WinXP bootloader with 9x code):
http://www.dougknox.com/xp/tips/xp_repair_9x.htm
--
Best of Luck,
Rick Rogers aka "Nutcase" MS-MVP - Win9x - http://mvp.support.microsoft.com/
Associate Expert - WinXP - Expert Zone - www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/expertzone
Win98 Help - www.rickrogers.org
"Danny Barlow" <bubrodrig
...@aol.com> wrote in message
news:026101c2f5bf$a4cafbc0$a501280a@phx.gbl...
> I recently acquired another hard drive (my old one) which
> has windows ME installed on it and I have the current
> drive with Windows XP. I slaved the ME drive to the XP
> drive and i also have a CDROM drive with a CDRW slaved to
> it. Now, i have set up the boot.ini file manually and
> it's contents are as follows:
> [boot loader]
> timeout=10
> default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS
> [operating systems]
> multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft
> Windows XP Professional" /fastdetect
> multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(1)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft
> Windows Millenium Edition *UNDER
> CONSTRUCTION*" /fastdetect
> Unfortunately, when i try to load ME i got a message
> saying: could not load ntoskrnl.exe please re-install. I
> copied this file over from the xp system directory over
> to the same location over on the ME drive and then i got
> a message saying it could not find the correct dlls. so
> once again i copied the required dlls over (by looking at
> a bootlog i made) and it says i need to reinstall. Would
> it help if i slaved the CDROM to the XP drive and then
> set the ME drive as a second master and slave the CDRW to
> it? Or is there another possible solution i might have
> overlooked. The precedence and order of installing the
> windows (DOS, 95, 98/me, 2k then NT) should not be
> applicable since the two OS' are on different volumes.
> Any help would be appreciated because i have some
> programs that would work better on my ME version of
> windows. Thank you very much.