I have not formatted a hard drive since DOS was the os of choice. I have to format the drives (4) and load win 2000 advanced server. What do I need? how do I start? what are the steps (in clear simple terms)?

Depending on the make of hard drive, there are several ways...the simplest... 1)go into the BIOS (by pressing either F2, Delete, Alt+Enter, or ESC depending on your machine) and change the boot sequence to boot from cd. put your 2K advanced server in and the installation process will ask if you want to format - just tell it to do so. 2)maxtor drives have maxblast software. western digital drives have their diagnostic tool disk - each of these format the respective drives and are available for download through the company's website. 3)boot to DOS mode and FDISK it. 4)hook the drive up as a slave drive (change the jumper pin configuration on the back of the drive and plug it in as a slave on the primary or secondary IDE channel) and boot to windows from a HDD with windows already installed. go to my computer, find the drive you wish to format, right click, and select format. its as simple as that. hope this helps!

you arent going to be administering a w2K server are you? don't mean to offend but, if you are, you are in over your head if you don't even know how to format a drive...

the installation cd for win2k is bootable and the installation will let you format and make as many partitions as you want

if you have to set up your drive using maxtor maxblast or any other type of program, you may encounter problems when doing a drive image. It is advisable to do a full drive image after you have have set up 2kserver, good luck.