Greetings.  I purchased a new 40 Gig WD hard drive, and a new HP 9500i CDRW
to replace an existing HD and CDRW.  I have the system (400mhz AMD, 128 M
RAM, AOpen MX59Pro motherboard) recognized both drives, and the DVD.  (HD is
Primary Master, CDRW is Secondary Master, DVD is Secondary Slave)

I was able to fdisk and format the drive with no problems.  The problem came
when installing Win2K.  It gets to the format in NTFS portion and says the
drive cannot be formatted.  If I tell it to leave the current file system it
says setup cannot created folder WINNT.  Thinking it was a bad drive, I
reformatted in FAT32 again, then installed Win98.  It installed completely
with no problems.  So I thought I'd try installing Win2K from inside Win98.
Got through the first portion of the installation just fine.  Rebooted
automatically, and it hung up again at the reformat/convert/leave as is
section of the install.  The message is now "Drive C is corrupted and cannot
be repaired".

I was running Win2K on this machine on the previous hard drive.  The only
thing that changed was the size (and brand) of the HD, and the CDRW is the
same brand, but a newer model.  All other settings are the same as they were
previously.

I'm about to pull my hair out with this one.  I spent all day yesterday
trying to force Win2k to install.  The only anomaly I can think of is that I
had a power surge Friday afternoon that caused the computer to reboot.  Is
it possible that there is damage to the IDE controller on the motherboard?
What other ideas do you folks have.  I wouldn't mind upgrading to a new
motherboard with a faster chip, but I don't want to go to the expense if
there are other problems.  In other words, I'm not keen on spending the
money if it still isn't going to work!

Thanks in advance,
Charles Mims
Daytona Beach, FL

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