At 08:43 AM 3/11/2001 -0500, you wrote:
>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".

Sadly, I went through about two weeks of pulling my hair out on the exact
same problem you are experiencing.  Numerous calls and posts to the Western
Digital on-line message boards proved that many others were having the same
problem.  To the best of my knowledge there was never a full resolution to
the problem, but there is a work-around.

In your BIOS, manually set your new HD to "PIO Mode 4" instead of using
UDMA or Auto on the drive.  Then you can install Windows 2000 without a
hitch.  After the install, go back in to the BIOS and set the drive back to
whatever you had before.  In about 50% of the posts on the WD message
boards, people were able to utilize UDMA again after the
install.  Unfortunately, I wasn't one of the lucky ones so I have to run
the drive in the slower PIO mode if I want to use Windows 2000.

Western Digital and Microsoft were fighting it out last I heard over who
was to blame for the problem.  Personally, I think it was WD since I even
went so far as to install on the same type of Maxtor HD without any
problems.  OTOH, you and I both successfully installed Windows 98 with a
hitch either, so who knows.

HTH

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