I installed win2k on a machine that was previously running nt 4.0. After loading win2k onto a partition that was not marked as the active one, i formatted the active partition and restarted. now the machine won't start because i erased the ntldr file. how can i get into the BIOS to change the active partition? thank you.

You can't change the active partition from your CMOS. Insert your rescue disk into the floppy frive, and boot to it. Then run FDISK and change the partition there. I have saw this error a lot with Windows 2000, there is a trick to fixing it. Go in your CMOS and change your bus frequency (i.e. 133 to 100). You computer may be overclocked a little and slowing this down would fix your problem. good luck

NTLDR missing has not much to do with partition status. On the assumption that NT was on the active primary partition.. you deleted more files than NTLDR, I would say that ntdetect.com and boot.ini would be gone also at minimum. Boot with a 98 start disk and use fdisk to set active partition. I think you can copy the files you wiped back on with your boot disk as long as the file system is NOT NTFS. If so then ERD commander or NTFSDOS will help. Good luck B