A few big problems

MY friend downloaded a Music Downloading Program that Messed up his computer quite bad He has a Emachine Running Windows ME First after he downloaded the programs he realized it made his cd drives dissapear then when he went to "fix" it he deleted a file named OLEAUT32.DLL Now with that gone they cant restore there computer using the automatic restore Or using the Disk that they have.. I am 1200 miles away or i would most likely be able to figure it out but I cant So i need help. They cant get on the computer and have to do everything thru safe mode Someone please help

 

Ok your first problem is Windows ME it is total crap of a windows system, the other issue if you can get into safe mode and troll around in various programs, look for system restore in the start menu and push the pc back to a time before these problems started happening probably a day or two before the issues.

Buy and or install Windows XP on the system it is much better then Windows ME.

 

Yea i agree windows me sucks but its not my computer and we cant do system restore because of that missing file OLEAUT32.DLL Basically we cant do much because of that And we cant re download it becasue the net dont work for them cant use restore disk because the cd drives are missing
My computer did that salso and i fixed the drives So basically how do they fix the drives so it will read a disk?

 

I thought about downloading that file on my computer and putting it on a floppy disk and sending it to them but we would still need to get the Cd -drives to work long enough to register there restore disk So really that is my main problem

 

Do the drives show in the device manager ?

If so with a yellow ! over them, right click the drive and post the error code listed on the first page of the properties.

 

No They have the disk drives C,D, And Floppy on there but the Cdroms are missing I had them un plug the drives and Plug em back in but still nothing They found one where it said F: But Once again in safe mode it wouldnt let them do much and when they went to my computer again It still wasnt listed

 

This seems more then I thought, I would need to see the PC upfront before I could really fix it where do they live ?

 

Windows ME can't currently see the drives, but it doesn't mean the motherboard BIOS can't. I would expect any restore CD worth its salt to assume you can't even get into Windows, and that's why you need to use it. It may just be a matter of booting, entering setup, changing the boot order to the first CD drive, and then rebooting with the restore CD in the drive. There is, of course, a distinction between Restore CDs and OS CDs. The first will "restore" the machine to the state it was in the day the PC was purchased-- meaning all personal files and programs later-installed G-O-N-E. If they have a WinME disk and can boot from it, a repair install would be the way to go.

 

Lol Yea like i said it pretty big They live in oklahoma on the out skirts of Okc Usually im there computer guy when her son messes it up but like i said im 1200 miles away so i cant do much.. Its hard to fix it with out seeing the problem first hand And the bad thing is is that there system restore Was turned off so even if they could do it It wouldnt register to before it messed up

 

HOw would you do the set-up , boot order and all that? And yes they want to wipe it clean They have there important stuff backed up All i know is ther ecomputer is an Emachine Pretty old Piece of Crap that breaks down easily (they have to restore it every few months) But they dont have money to buy a new one yet She said you can put the disk in the drive and the lights light up and it trys to do its thing but It dont end up getting thru

 

If the Restore disc is not bootable, or their machine cannot boot from it, it might require a boot floppy to invoke the restore process, which should be included in the restore set.