My buddy dropped off his PC that he was having trouble with. He had Win98 on there, and wanted Win2K so it'd be more stable. I booted from the Win2K disk and installed the OS, only to find out that it didn't over write Win98! I could have sworn this worked in the past...

Do I need a bootable floppy to then "format C" before I can have Win2K as the only OS? IT's been so long since I've had to do this, I'm not sure where I went wrong...

(I can see someone pulling out there Tech Support Magic 8 Ball) .

"Feature / Known Issue"... (You asked for that one!!! )

I have seen this happen before. Basically you need to either overwrite or rename the windows directory (c:\windows) instead of using the 2000 default (c:\winnt). Personally, I prefer to wipe the system completely. Windows 2000 and 98 are different enough that it might be best to avoid problems.

If the system is otherwise functional, you can always deactivate the "dual boot" aspect by editing the hidden c:\boot.ini file. A little wasteful of disk, but acceptable depending on the situation.

Flatten it!!

I usually backup Documents and Settings (everything I need is in there, I'm a My Documents sort of guy) over to CD/another drive. Restart the machine and boot off the install CD and use that to reformat. Then once I've finished setting up I usually just drop the saved Documents and Settings back onto the root. Works every time.

I usually boot into Linux on the machine, rm -rf everything except docs&sets (and whatever else I want to keep), then boot from CD. I boot into Linux because it does the delete about a hundred times faster than DOS mode.

If you really want to wipe EVERYTHING off for a totally clean install, then first use fdisk to delete the exisitng partitions. Then restart win setup.

-ml

I booted from the Win2K disk and installed the OS,

Somewhere during that procedure, very early on, were you given a screen that showed you the partitions on the hard disk, asking you where you wanted to installe Windows 2000?

The correct thing to do on that screen is to select the existing partitions and press the D key (I think, I don't recall exactly) to delete the partitions. Then there is nothing left on the hard disks and it just says "empty space" or something like that in the list of partitions.

Then you install Windows to the empty partition. It asks you how you want it formatted (FAT or NTFS) and you say NTFS.

That's the proper way to install Windows 2000 from scratch. No need to use a DOS floppy or FDISK or anything, because it's all built-in to the Win2K installer program.

The correct thing to do on that screen is to select the existing partitions and press the D key (I think, I don't recall exactly) to delete the partitions

Like I said, only in much more detail.

You guys rock! Thank you! The dumping the partition during install did the trick.

Now, if I have as much luck w. my drunk mouse, I'll be all set!