The difference there is that third-party boot loaders such as lilo and Grub are pretty much independent of the operating systems they can boot. Those bootloaders don't care if they're booting Windows, Linux, BSD, etc., nor do they really care what particular versions of those operating systems you have. Also, the files those bootloaders use don't integrate/conflict with any of the boot programs/files used by Windows.

Your problem may lie with the bootsect.dos file, and you might be able to avoid a full reinstall by recreating that file. Here's the deal: when you use the Win 2k or XP bootloader to boot a previous, non-NT based OS like Win 9.x or ME), the bootloader reads information in the bootsect.dos file for instructions on where to find and how to boot the older OS. I'm not positive about this, but my guess is that because ME was not already installed when you installed XP, the bootsect.dos file that XP created during its installation process doesn't contain any information about the ME install. That might cause XP's loader to fail on ME, because bootsect.dos is the file the boot process jumps to when you choose the ME option in boot.ini.

Again, I'm not sure if rebuilding bootsect.dos will work, but if you want to give it a try you can find more info on the process in some of the links returned by this Google search:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&l...os&btnG=Search

To add more to it, the reason why it's so painless is because Linux was designed from the get-go to coexist with other operating systems. I doubt there will ever be a day that Microsoft will do this-- they don't really want to make it easy for you to boot any other OS on a computer running Microsoft Windows. Ask Be, Inc. and the OEMs who tried to load BeOS and Windows from the factory...

My HP 753n desktop will turn on and clicks a few times but wont boot up

CAN SOMEONE HELP ME

Dude, you need to start your own thread. This ensures that everyone gets their share of attention.

Regarding your post, we need more details

You should reinstall Windows ME and then install XP. In both cases, choose the upgrade option, and not the Clean Install option. This way, you won't lose any of your settings or any programs you may have installed.

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