Try taking out all your pci cards an just leaving in Your Graphics Card, reboot then enter your bios then detect your hard drive, load setup defauts dont forget to change your boot sequence to boot from cd rom save and exit, You might have to fdisk you hard drive then create a new partion but dont format as windows will do that for you ( you can fdisk from a windows 95 / 98 boot disk) then se what Happens you might have an irq conflict with some of your hardware if windows then loads ok you might have to do some card shuffling after windows has loaded if it still do's it then you must get a bios update or you might have a faulty hard drive !!!!

i may try taking out the pci cards. but i believe i allready tried that once.
i dont think the hardrive is fualuty because i just got it, and it seams to work ok. but i do know that nothing runs under udma mode. if i put an item on udma, windows freeses on the white startup screen. i am wondering if the bios is changing it to run in udma mode or something even thou i turn it off.
 
i tried to update the bios once before, but the new bios i got said it was the same version, and wouldent let me right over it. this is driving me crazy, i should mabey just try and trade my mobo on board.3dfiles.com

If your bios detects your hard drive as ultra DMA you will see it in the bios splash screen ( the bios never lie's) which you can pause while booting then hit return to carry on. Windows 2000 will probably install it as PIO mode in the device manager it will only be detected as PIO if windows is not sure, you can change it to ultra DMA from there if it locks on booting go to safe mode and change it back. Regarding your bios you can over write as many times as you like with the same bio's update. As regards to your hard drive being new or not it can still be fauty !!! You have to be carefull upgrading your bios one mistake could render it unbootable.

I think this is related to ACPI.If the win2k setup doesn't detect that your BIOS is ACPI it will hang at the setup screen,try setting your BIOS to APM or disable ACPI mode and rerun the setup again.If you are sure that your BIOS is ACPI compatible do this, run the
setup as soon as you see PRESS F6....message try pressing F5 and then you can choose which
power management option you want win2k to install.Hope this helps.Let us know.

I will have to try that then, i need to get some recordables before i do a clean install. thanks everyone for your help so far.

As a rule not all operating systems support ACPI only Windows 98 and Windows 2000 so when you load Bios defaults or bios setup defaults ACPI is disabled by default !!! so you have to enable ACPI manualy. Not all mobo manufactures have got there acts together yet as regarding ACPI in Windows 2000 I would like to think they are working on it !!!.

I was having the same problem blue screen while detecting hardware. Loading the bios defaults worked for me. I beleive its the memory timings.

I had that problem originally with my BP6 motherboard, Then I moved my hard drive cable off the ata66 slot and windows installed and still runs great.

Umm, is the BIOS setup to autodetect the drive? I know that I have occasionally forgotten to reset the drive parameters from old drive settings on a mother board in the past. If you setup Win2K on one hd/hd controller combo and then try to run it on another machine, it will have a fit (I know, because I was able to upgrade my server with a new motherboard and the Beta of Win2K AS had a fit and I had to reinstall the OS). I have done mobo/hd changes with WinNT/9x in the past w/o problems, but Win2K is a little different. It seems to like to stay on the hardware that it was originally setup on. Go figure.
 

 
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Regards,
 
clutch

It is set on auto detect. but what do mean take it of the ata66? i only have 2 ide ports on my mobo, the one is primary and the other is secondary.