New HDD has boot-itus

[Gnerma]

This is a salvage build consisting mostly of the main components of my last box, an HP. It consists of ..

the dvd drive that came with it originally
A brand new maxtor 20gb HDD
a 1ghz tbird
a ASUS A7V-VM mirco board/w the VIA KT133 chipset
a 256mb stick of SDRAM
a TNT2 video card

Doesn't sound bad, right? Remember this is an HP though, or WAS at one time. So the bios is lame, it does not let me access it at all.

Alright here is the situation. I'm trying to install windows 2000 onto the new HDD. Windows 2000 goes through the first phase of the setup process fine.

It ..
loads the setup files
makes a partition
tests the drive
installs necessary files
reboots

Then I get this error after the POST

"Windows 2000 could not start because of a computer disk hardware configuration problem.
Could not read from the selected boot disk. Check boot path and disk hardware.
Please check the windows 2000 documentation about hardware disk configuration and your hardware reference manuals for additional information."

Thats VERBATIM

Could it be that there is no boot sector? I thought windows sets that up? Also, could the old info in the bios be messing up the boot process?

Also, when I try to FDISK the drive FDISK freezes on me. Right at the point when it gets the drive information .. ??

When the error happens I don't have a floppy in the FDD. Thanks to anyone who helps.

[morriswindgate]

Did you read this from MS

http://support.microsoft.com/default...;EN-US;q227704

[Gnerma]

Thanks Morris that did the trick! BUT it seems to only be a temporary fix.

This 'limbo' land outside of an OS is truly still a mystery to me so I don't really know what is going on. I think that the PC is using the boot disk to boot off of and either has a nonexistant or damaged boot sector. So, if the disk isn't present during start up, I get the same error message. So how do I 'fix' the boot process?

[morriswindgate]

Try changing the boot order to boot up on the cd-rom and then set up the hard disk from the 2000 CD.

[Gnerma]

The problem has been solved. Morris thanks again for the link to that KB article. It lead me down the correct path. What was wrong was, for some reason the boot.ini file was screwed. I rewrote it, overwrote it & the box boots fine.

Ya shoulda seen the smile of my buddies girlfriends face when she picked it up.