I'd like to set my system back up like it was previous to a freeze that started occurring at the Win2000 startup screen, but revert back to Win98 w/fat32. Since then, I've fdisk/mbr'ed and nuked all partitions. When I go to display partition info, it says I've got a 9 gig active non-dos "fat32" part., but below that it states there is "only 504 megs total disk space available." Normally, I would set up a 2.5 gig system drive and use the rest for software, but I was trying everything I could think of to nuke it all. I'm assuming that this is a 2000 NTFS partition that won't go away with the 98 boot disk's fdisk. I tried the repair console which doesn't make much sense cuz there is no w2000 on the drive, and it only led me to another w2000 install, which I did anyway, even tho I'm only working with 504 megs supposedly. It took a while, and when done, it froze again as before, just after the startup progress meter appeared. I tried the delpart.exe program, which supposedly nukes NTFS partitions to no avail. My Maxtor hd fdisk/format disk doesn't recognize it either. The initial message I got before nuking the drive was a STOP error as follows... STOP: c0000221 Unknown Hard Error\System32 \ntdll.dll I don't know whether or not this is a factor anymore due to the fdisking and all, but I just thought It might help somebody help me. Anybody that has help info would be greatly appreciated.

Try using the 3 install floppies(?) for W2K/NT and follow the prompts around the 3rd. disk area (after the license agreement...) to remove partitions? I don't yet have much experience with W2 K, about to finally 'play' with it.... but I'm presuming it's pretty much the same as NT4 in terms of the install options etc... Equally running install from the CD may/should allow the same options... HTH... Good luck,

I agree with lm-s. Go back throught the install and when it asks to install to that partition change the format to FAT. Otherwise your disk manufacturers web site may have a utility to write 0's to your disk or do a low level format and start clean.