Win 2k freezing on boot

[sym]

Hello -

I am trying to setup my friends old PC (633mhz HP Pavillion) with Windows 2000. The situation is as follows

It has a 18 gig hard drive and a CD Rom Drive. The harddrive has ME loaded on it, and it can still boot into ME. I tried to boot to my Windows 2000 CD to reformat the HD, and install 2K. When booting to the CD, I get a message that the BIOS/CD isn't ATPI (I think that was the word) compatible, and that I should upgrade the bios. It did give me the option of pressing F7 and disabling ATPI support. I used the F7 option, and it did get Windows 2K setup. One thing I did notice was that it didn't let me reformat the drive though, only install next to ME. When I boot now, I get the option for ME or 2K. If I select the ME option, I can boot just fine, if I select the 2K option, it will freeze on the splash screen (the screen that says "Windows 2000", and has the blue bar going across on the bottom). No error messages, just stops responding.

My questions are:

• Any idea why this is freezing?
• Any idea how to fix this problem?
• I'm not sure what the motherboard is, but the current bios is Phoenix BIOS 4.0 version 6.0 version 2.02 (didn't make sense to me), can someoene help me find any available BIOS upgrades?

Thank you for your help.