i have to partitions ....c: is the faulty one. when booting it constantly ask me WINDOWS INSTALLER ...preparing to install.. I cannot do anything on "C" drive...tried to reinstall win2000 from d drive but then i cannot select where i want to have it reinstalled...it does it automatically on d drive again...any solution...dont want to reformat c drive....(if possible)

I don't know if this describes your situation at all, but i ran into a problem where after installing a program, windows would reboot, boot to the gui, then the windows installer would pop up and give the message you indicated above "windows installer... Preparing to install." It would do it's thing and then reboot the computer the finish the installation. When the computer rebooted, it would give the give the same messages, go through the motions and then reboot again, basically an endless loop. To fix the problem i booted up into safe mode and uninstalled whatever software was recently installed. (i believe it was either the cdburner software or control software for an hp multifunction printer/scanner/fax machine.) anyway, after that the pc was able to boot normally again, and i just reloaded the software i removed, this time without incident. if this in any way describes your problem, you may want to try similar action. Hope this helps