Format c Drive by accident!!! What now?

[Birling]

Hi, it appears my young son has managed to format the C: drive on our pc which operated on ME. I only have a startup disk. My friend has a Fujitsu product recovery disk for WME but the EULA seems corrupted and gives error message along the lines of Spawn....

I have tried allsorts to get it going to no avail.

I do have a copy of Win WP Home but I cannot get it on to the pc either.

The CD drive appears now to be A: and the floppy B: All too confusing for me. Any suggestions to get the beast going,appreciated.
Cheers.

FujitsuSiemens T-Bird

[harry12]

Damage limitiation needed!
Don't do anything that writes to the HDD! "Format" doesn't necessarily destroy the OS...it merely moves the index-table. I suspect the CDrom drive letter is yr son moving things about. It's not a big issue though as many PC users like to boot from the CD (eg if you are trying a so-called Live CD) - these are popular with Linux (esp Ubuntu) and can be used to investigate a HDD, since it doesn't use the HDD to run the program, but it's a bit of a specialist area, sorry I don't have the competance......
You are posting in the ME zone - yet you appear not to have a WinME,CD.....why not try to get one at a computer fair? Always a useful standby if everything goes belly-up... maybe $10.....a complete reload is less than a half-day and serves to clear out much junk you never knew you had. You will need all yr software on CD and driver discs, for printers, usb etc. and any fancy Video-cards, etc. ...best to check these are all working before the Big Load.
Sorry, I cann't suggest anything else...USA is waking up now, so maybe a few bright idea await....good luck...and a sharp slap to.....and maybe give him the task of reloading the PC..that might stop any future fiddling. It really surprises me that "Format" will format itself.......but we know that...PC's are really stupid.