Help with Mandrake 8.0/Windows 2000

[Angela]

Hello,

I just built my pc, and installed Mandrake 8.0 on it. It was running okay, but I had trouble with freezes in KDE & couldn't access my cd or floppy drives from linux. I decided to start over & install windows 2000 for now, and perhaps when I have more time and get another hard drive, run linux. I went into the Mandrake CD & deleted all my partitions and reformatted. Now, I can't get win2000 installed. I put the cd in, it recognizes it, starts the installation process, however, after the license agreement, it asks me to insert a NT, 95, or 98 cd to verify that I qualify for the update. My problem is, I don't have anything to update. I bought this CD with my hard drive from mwave.com, and it is the full version of windows 2000. I attempted to use a startup disk that was given to me by a friend of mine that he used to install his win2000, but my floppy drive won't read anything. It lights up & appears to be working, but it just takes me to the lilo screen for linux(which is no longer installed). In short, I have a mess. If anyone has any suggestions, they would be appreciated. My system specs are below:

Soyo K7VTA PRO VIA KT133A Chipset
Thunderbird K7 266MHz 1.33 GHz Socket A
IBM Deskstar Ultra ATA/100 7200rpm HD 40 gigs
256MB, 168 pin DIMM Micron ram, from crucial.
Turtle Beach Santa Cruz Sound Card
Hitachi GD7500 12X DVD/40X CDROM
ATI Radeon Vivo mb AGP

[Kckazdude]

You will have to reformat you're HDD to the NT file system as it differs from the HDD file system used in Linux. I'm not entirely sure but I think the utility for that is FDisk on the boot floppy that you're friend gave you. You will also need to enable floppy boot in the BIOS to be able to run the application. I would suggest keeping the Linux install as well. There is a huge learning curve to it but it is very worth the higher learning. Check out www.linuxnewbie.org for some assistance in the Linux area.

[mairving]

Actually Windows NT/2000 doesn't use FDISK. It does sound like you have an upgrade CD though. If you do the only thing to do is to get a Windows 98/NT CD. You don't have to install it. Just wait until Windows 2000 says it can't find an upgrade, then you can stick your CD in and go from there. To get rid of lilo, you could put a Windows 95/98 boot disk in. Boot off of the floppy and do fdisk /mbr.

As far as Linuxnewbie.org goes, I think that it is kind of a mixed bag. There is a lot of good advice over there but there is also a lot of bad advice. Much more flaming goes on than over here and sometimes there are so many posts that yours gets buried pretty quick. Besides they don't have Statica and WickedLittleSlaveBoy and some of the others here.

Linux really is not for everyone. It is a fun thing to learn though. It sounds kind of silly but you almost have to treat it as a marriage instead of a date. In other words, if you go into it with no comittment, wanting to know everything that there is right away. The first problem that comes up, you will bail out, which happens to a lot of people. But if you come into it saying, I am going to stick with it and learn this thing, then you will succeed. It is not as easy to use as Windows and the thing that most people don't understand is that unlike Windows, you don't have to use the desktop to get things done. On my system, I have forgotten that it even has a mouse.

[Statica]

& just another thought, you got ONE floppy as the bootdisk/setup disk for Win2K? There should be 4. You should have no problems at all removing the Linux partitions with Win2k, unless perhaps you made multiple extended partitions. It does sound like an upgrade CD. Did it come with all the usual M$ paraphenilia or did you just get a plain ole CD?

[WickedLittleSlaveBoy]

you should have run 'lilo -u' before you removed Mandrake. it sounds like it's still installed to the MBR. to fix it, grab a DOS bootdisk from where ever and boot....run:

fdisk /MBR

to remove lilo, then try installing Windows 2000. you shouldn't see a lilo prompt, anymore.

[WickedLittleSlaveBoy]

hmmmm. I guess I only see what I want to see sometimes. doesn't look like you can install W2K.

don't use your friend's disk, create your own. there's a makeboot.exe utility in a directory of your CDROM, it's something obvious like bootdisks or something(sorry, no 2K cdrom anywhere close). then use those floppies....if it doesn't work, call mwave.com and find out what they sold you.

[Angela]

I got it installed, thanks for all the replies. My floppy still isn't working for some reason, so I couldn't use any kind of boot disk. I did, however, get it installed just using the 2000 cd. It's working great, aside from the floppy drive.

Thanks again,
angela