installing win 2000 pro

[engineuity]

my pc is fairly old. prebuilt so i dont all the specs. its a p2 i think 133mhz. ive been running win 98 plus for a while and decided to upgrade to 2000 pro. i installed pro and partitioned the drive as ntsf...which is a pain because im going to need to use a linux os also...but thats a separate issue. it turns out that i now have windows 2000 pro AND windows to choose to boot from...but only the 2000 pro will boot. thats fine. i didnt want the windows 98 anyways but i would like to format the drive clean and only have 2000. ive made a floppy bootdisk (from makeboot file) since it wont boot from cd. everything will load fine until i get to the 3rd bootdisk. i then get an error that there is a corrupt file "dmsys. " or "dmboot. " i dont remember the exact but i will retry after the post and get it exactly. is there anywhere i can get the file if its corrupted or am i just gonna have to live with the disorder on my computer??

[JohnE.]

Can you see the FAT32 partition that Win98 is on from Win2K? If so, you can format the FAT32 partition directly from the Win2K Management Console. Of course, backup/move any data you want to keep first

Welcome to TechIMO!

If it were me, I'd use a plain 'ol 9X boot disk and partition your HDD for Win2K. You don't need to format, just create your Primary DOS partition. Then you could boot w/ the floppys and install 2K. It will let you format as NTFS during the install.

How big a HDD is it? How much RAM?

As for your bootdisk issue, try recreating the disks again. More than likely the floppy is bad.

[engineuity]

just did the bootdisk again and the file is "dmboot.sys" i dont have any other disks to load from since it was prebuilt by someone they have decided to keep the disks and are of no help to me
primary hdd is 8 gig secondary is 15
os is on the 8
ram is 3 sticks of kingston ktm0274/128 128mb
i dont really want the ntsf but ill deal until i need to load linux
ive redone the disks 3 times and still same error

[pawprint]

engineuity,
I am currently installing win 2000 pro and ironically enough, the same dilemma happened to me.The problem with the install is that you can't format the partition because win 2000 needs to copy its setup files onto that partition, so the previous win 98 install remained on the c drive as windows, and win 2000 installs as winnt. It does give you the option during install of deleting the partition thou!...lol...so it is easy to get confused.
I was unable to remove win98 from the startup menu even after editing the boot.ini file. I also deleted the windows folder, and all previous win98 installed applications.I was getting weird hdd error messages after using partition magic 7 , so decided to do a clean install.
You need to download a bootable win98se or win me oem boot disk that includes ramdrive
here .
Check your BIOS so that your a drive is first boot option, for example, a,c,cd-rom.
Use your boot disk to start up your computer, use start with cd-rom support option.
Ramdrive loads the startup disk using E, so your cd-rom would be your F drive.
At the A: command prompt, type in F: then enter. Place your win 2000 cd in the cd-rom, then type in dir then enter. You should see the I386 folder listed. Type in cd which means command, then spacebar then I386, then enter.
It should read F:/I386. Type in dir/w, then enter. You should see WINNT.EXE located at the end of this folder list. This is the setup command for win2000. Type in WINNT.EXE, then enter, and this will begin your win 2000 installation. You can exit out at this point knowing that you can successfully boot up and install win 2000.
Now restart your boot disk without cd-rom support, and when ramdisk loads, type in C: at the A: prompt. At the C: prompt, type in format C: then enter.{Use spacebar to create a space between the format and c} Type in y for yes to confirm formatting your c drive.When format completes you can name your c drive if you wish.
Restart your bootdisk choosing with cd-rom support, and follow above instructions to start win 2000 install.
cheers, ~pawprint~

[elroy]

After you get a windows os on there download WCPUID and you can find out what cpu you have.
http://hp.vector.co.jp/authors/VA002.../download.html

[engineuity]

everything is fine except the formatting of the c: drive
ive found in a mag that converting back to fat32 from ntfs you:
at c prompt type "format c: /fs:fat32"
ive tried both ways and format c: tells me that c doesnt support the format and the format c: /fs..... tells me that it is an invalid switch.
i feel like i am ALMOST there but cant get past that format...frustrating

[engineuity]

OKAY ive got it
in system tools theres a command prompt. when opened, you are in a folder called documents and settings. you need to change all the way to the c: directory. to do this i typed "cd ../" i had to do that twice to get to the c:. from there i typed "format c: /fs:fat32" and that will format the c drive from ntfs to fat32.