Hmmm,
Now, perhaps your GF hasn't given you all the bits and pieces or I have missed something very basic. There has to be a way to boot the machine, as back in the days of Me the options were limited and MS only allowed two ways of installing an OS: -
1) Direct boot from CD
2) Boot via floppy and then install from CD.
So, which is it here?
I am not trying to be smart here - but to solve the problem we need to understand how dell expected the user to re-install the OS - I can guarantee they didn't expect you to send it back to them.....
Are the orignal manuals/disks to hand? It has either got to be CD or floppy....
Regards,
Shuttlebus
Edited to include..
Frostbite may have a bead on the problem... try popping the WinMe CD in the drive, set the Bios to floppy and see what happens. From memory an "install over the top" will not delete your data".