I was recently given a HP Pavilion 6623, when I first turned it on it had a stock install of Windows 98SE, but it was very cluttered and broken, so I figured ok I will format it and then install Windows 2000, I restart with dban and zero the drive, start the Windows 2000 installation, it gets right up to the first restart your comptuer screen (Mind you, it has already copied all of the files.) it restarts, nothing, I get the "No Operating System found." screen, I can boot from CD, I can boot from the floppy, just not the HDD, I've tried 2 hard drives and neither have worked (10GB Maxtor, 6GB Fujitsu, the Fujitsu I know works as I pulled it out of my working P2 box.) I've also tried a few different IDE cables, the jumper settings are correct, the bios recognises both drives, but booting from a 98SE startup disk I cannot fdisk, everytime I start fdisk it asks if I want large drive support, and whether I go yes or no the screen closes and goes back to the command prompt with no error messages, nothing recognises the drives, however drive diagnostic software does and can test both the drives successfully, but I cannot start from the drives. Any ideas on what the problem could be?

Win98 uses FAT32, Win2K uses NTFS. I haven't used FDISK in a long time...use the Maxtor or Fujitsu software (download from their websites), or just boot off the Win2K CD & format from there ASUS A7N8X-X Athlon XP 1800+ 8.5 x 200MHz 1024MB PC3200 2.5-3-3-7 Asus A9550GE/TD 128MB WinME/WinXP Pro SP1

I've formatted with 2k already, it copies the files, then when it restarts it jsut does not boot or it gives me "Operating System not found." - And regardless, Fdisk should still be able to come up and give me information on the HDD and at the most tell me its a non-DOS partition. I've reset the bios, checked and double checked the cabling, etc, nothing works. But yet pretty much everything boots from the CD-rom (Even Knoppix/Damn small linux.) I've also checked all the bios settings and everythign appears to be right, I've also tried switching the HDD from the primary IDE channel to secondary and the CD-rom to primary, and still no luck.

did you set the partition as active (bootable) ? (likely the problem) Do not know why fdisk will not read the partition table. You can use Knoppix- qtparted to look at partition table or likely win2000 has some program.

Some OEM manufacturers put a small partition at the front of the drive. Download and run DelPart. It will show the partitions. You can use it to delete all the partitioning and start from scratch. http://www.russelltexas.com/delpart.htm

Nevermind, I have it working now, apparently I skipped over a bios setting (Large disk access mode was on "Other").