I have an Adaptec SCSI card, model 29160, and a Seagate SCSI hard drive, model ST318436LW. Everything worked fine under Windows 98, but now I’m trying to do a clean install of Windows 2000. I have downloaded the current drivers.

I did a low-level format (wrote zeroes to the hard drive) using the utilities from Seagate and formatted the hard drive with Seagate DiskWizard Starter Edition.

Now when I try to install Win 2000, things go fine, and I’m able to load all the files, including the SCSI driver. But when the installation gets to “Starting Win 2000,” it hangs up.

I’m stumped. Any suggestions?

Bill B.

My preferred method of prepping a drive for a Win2K install is with a Win98 boot disk which also contains the Format program. I delete all existing partitions (if possible) using fdisk and then do fdisk /mbr. I then create my new partition and format the drive. I've found that by using format I'm able to verify the integrity of the disk "if no sectors need to be recovered". Once completed I proceed with the install letting the CD do it's stuff to the end.

Earlier I said if possible. One time I had trouble deleting an extended non-DOS partition with fdisk but was able to remove it with the Win2K install CD when prompted to keep or delete existing partitions. I'm not sure what happened or why but things worked out.

Yes, I have download the tools, it's says the drive has no errors and I've made both test, quick and extensive.

As for the BIOS, I tried to flash it, but when it comes to boot up, nothing happens when the disk is in the floppy, strange, not the first time i'm flashing a BIOS, looks like a flashing protection but there's no protection of this kind on the BIOS himself.

Could it be possible to have a hardware protection (directly on the board) that prevent flashing the BIOS?

I'm starting to think I can't flash the BIOS on this board ...