Hi, I currently obtained a laptop with Windows XP OS on it. I need to reformat the harddrive and install Windows 2000 on it. Only thing is that there is no A floppy drive since it has a cd-rom drive so i can't boot with my win98 bootdisk. So basically i need to know howto access a command prompt before windows loads so i can fdisk it. I tried burning my bootdisk files on a cdr and boot from cdrom but it didn't recognize it as a bootable cd-rom. Please help :\

Odd, I did just that with both win95 and 98 and created "bootable" versions of those OSes and it worked fine. Did you check the BIOS, see if your boot device order is set to boot from cd-rom before the hdd?

ok, i checked my bios again and it does boot from the cd-rom first. just to make sure.. to make a boot cd all you do is pretty much take the contents from a boot floppy and burn them to a cdr correct? because that's what i did and it's still not recognizing my cd-r as a bootable cd-rom. thanks

what burning program are you using? In NERO you must choose the option "CD-ROM (Boot), then where it asks for the bootable image drive, select your floppy drive, copy them that way, then it should recognize it as a boot cd. NERO adds some little thing that makes it work, just copying them for some reason does not work. I'm not sure how it's done in easy CD, but I'm sure theres a similar option, to make a boot cd-rom.

Hope that helps.

thanks for that nero tip jeff i never realized it even existed. so i made a win2k boot cd with nero and it detected it and everything went fine. i fdisk'd, deleted then added the new partition, then formatted it. then began installing win2k and at about 3% the laptop shut up instantly. i tried again and got the same thing. i then re-added the partition and re-formatted and now it shuts off during format. ANY idea whats causing these abrupt turn-offs?