Hi. I am going to insatll 2k professional over Xp Home edition. I have deleted the NTFS partition Xp used (did it with Fdisk from a 98se Bootdiskette), and created a primary dos partition using Fdisk. When I run the 2000 cd, it tells me that it did not detect a harddrive, and I think it is becasue I havent formated anything. When I type format :c at the bootdisk, it says something about media not being read or anything like that. Any ideas what I can do?

Try creating a boot disk installer using your Win2000 CD; then try installing it by using those bootable floppy diskettes...then have fun after installing your WIN2K!

How big is your harddrive? Did you have Fdisk mark the primary partition you created as active? Did you reboot after using Fdisk?

My HD is 160 gb. When you say create the diskettes with the 2000 CD, do you mean that I can create them when I boot with the CD, or should I do it from windows? (Only got XP running on another PC)

I'm not sure that this is your problem but Win2000 can't utilise disks larger than 137GB prior to SP3, I believe it is. Boot to the BIOS screens and see if the drive is identified there properly. What version of Fdisk did you use to create the new primary partition? For disks larger than 64GB you need to use Fdisk64. Find it here: radified.com/files

I used the old Fdisk. Do you think it will format of I try making a primary with Fdisk 64?

Using the old Fdisk will give you an unusable partition. Using fdisk64 will work fine for the partition. I am not sure how Win2000 will handle it though. I think that what will happen is that it will see the drive as something less than 137GB. After applying the service packs I am unsure wheather the unaccounted drive space will then be usable. My suggestion would be to create at least two partitions. The primary being the one used for Win2000 smaller than 137GB. I recommend much smaller, easier to manage boot partitions. Maybe 20GB at the most. Create an extended partition using the remaining space. If you want only two partitions then create a logical drive using all the available space in the extended partition. Do all this using Fdisk64. Boot to the Win2000CD and Format the primary partition and install Windows. After all service packs and updates have been applied then you can format the logical drive from within Win2000sp4. The entire drive will be usable and the primary partition will be easier to backup and maintain. All of this is predicated on the BIOS seeing the entire drive. It appears you have state of the art hardware so I am assuming this isn't an issue.