Hi, i know that i shouldnt upgrade winME to windows 2000, so i chose the new install instead.

after the w2k install, i see that there is still the WINDOWS folder in C: which originally belonged to winME. i also see the WINNT folder, which i belive belongs to w2k.

is it safe to delete the WINDOWS folder? since windows 2000 doesnt seem to use it and it does take up quite a bit of space.

Thanks.

If your just gonna install a new operating system, why not just format your drive, and start off fresh. What you are doing now can be done. It's like a parrarel installation or mirror installation, but not quite. Get rid of everything and start off fresh. It is always advised for Windows 2000 to be freshly installed. I recknon freshly install any OS, but thats my opinion. If you don't wanna do this you can delete your "c:\Widnows" Directory and also directories and files in you 'program files' will become invalid and won't be recocnised by the new installation. So install the new software again to validate the registry. In other words. Your going to have crap all around the place.
It would be quicker and better to start off fresh.

Having gone for a clean install means that you now have a dual-boot?

If so then ensure the default to boot OS = W2K; boot to it; locate and delete (via Explorer) the Windows (ME) folder... You can leave the boot.ini entry (for ME) there if you wish - it takes so little space?

But perhaps retain the dual-boot? Not everything runs OK under W2K and '9x/ME is a useful fallback?

Winnt is the W2K folder; do NOT remove that..

Thank you for your replies, really appreciate it.

I have to confess something. My copy of windows 2000 was downloaded from the Internet from a friend of mine, so its not perfectly legal, but im not sure that's the case here.

Um yes, i DID reformat C: to freshly install my windows 2000, but for some weird reason the w2k cd isnt bootable (is the real thing supposed to be bootable?)

So i used the windows ME startup floppy to use my cdrom drive to access the w2k CD, but i couldnt run setup.exe from DOS, so i tried the i386 folder and tried winnt.exe and winnt32.exe. neither worked. i tried winnt.exe and it looked like it was about to start the real setup, but then an error message came up, i cant remember exactly, but it went something like this:

"setup cannot install windows boot loader. please make sure that the hard drive is not damaged or has not been formatted. setup cannot continue. press ENTER to exit."

So then i re-installed winME (had no choice) and then started the w2k setup from inside windows.

Thanks, everything is under control right now.