We have an old Packard Bell PC, which came from PC World with Windows Millenium pre installed.
I would like to get it working again and would like to reinstall the OS.
We have moved house twice since we bought it and the discs and manuals have long since disappeared. It does still have the Microsoft licence stuck to the side with the activation code. Does anyone know how to reinstall this please?

Why do you need to reinstall the o/s. Did you change out the hardrive?

My son uninstalled it to try to get a Linux operating system working on it. He lost interest and it was left in the attic after he went to uni. We recently moved house and came across it again. I have switched it on and got nothing much to happen, a couple of beeps and a black screen. My son doesn't remember what position it was in when he left it.

Go into bios by pressing the F1 or Del key when first turning on the computer and see what the boot order is set at first. Try changing the boot order to c drive 1st. Also there might be an option in your bios to do a system restore from a partition on the hardrive. I hope your son knew what he was doing when it came to linux because hopefully he ran it as a live cd 1st. If he did the boot order will be cdrom 1st. If he ran it as a live cd nothing should be lost on your hardrive. If he tried a full install then your hardrive was reformated to ext2 or ext3 file format instead of fat32 or ntfs and the hardrive had all the Windows ME erased. Thats why I say check the bios 1st and check the boot order 1st. If unsure what to do set the bios to default settings and save your settings and let it reboot and post reseults.

I just realized you said he uninstalled Windows ME. How did he go about uninstalling it and why? You don't need to uninstall windows to get linux to work. I run Windows and Linux on 1 of my computers together. If he wiped ME off the hardrive you are not going to be able to reinstall unless you find another Retail ME package like on Ebay. It would be easier to find a Windows 2000 pro O/S than a ME disc on ebay and your system should handle it. Other wise If you find the ME install in your computer =, keep it. If your system is totally wiped I suggest downloading and burning this as it is free and pretty hardware friendly.

Download | Mandriva