[win2kugh]

I have backed into being the tech support guy for our office and I have run into a big problem. I don't know if anyone out there can help but I would really appreciate any and all advice. I have flushed and reloaded numerous win 98se and win me machines in the past and went to do the same to a machine running win 2k. I wanted to load win 98se on the machine so I foolishly started in the same manner that i do with machines currently running win 98se. The following text explains what happened. Sorry for being so wordy but I wanted people to have as much information as possible. Thanks in advance for the assistance.

I went to flush & reload our lone win 2k machine. Because I was going to load win 98se on the computer, I inserted the system disk for win 98se in the floppy drive and turned on the computer. I was planning to start fdisk then delete partitions, create new ones, format the drive, etc. to load win 98se. I couldn't not start fdisk, though, because of an error I do not exactly remember. I am pretty sure it told me that it didn't recognize any disks or something to that effect. I then got really smart. I figured I would just get around the problem by deleting the raid array because i thought that would effectively delete whatever was on the hard drive. I then recreated raid on the computer and thought this would then allow me to use my setup disk to run fdisk and proceed as usual. This was, however, not the case.

I still got an error message saying something to the effect that no disk was present. I next tried using the win 2k setup disks to boot the computer. This did not work either. I could begin installing win 2k but it would get to the point of asking about unpartitioned space on the hard drive (and it was reading the right amount of space by the way), but it would not let me install win 2k on any space that I partitioned. It would say something to the effect that the partition wasn't set up to handle win 2k and that I should delete existing partitions, create new ones and install win 2k on one of those. I would then go back to the partition set up screen and delete and create new partitions but to no avail.

It was somewhere in the middle of this that it occurred to me that win 2k and win 98 use two different partitioning systems for hard drives. (2k - NTFS and 98 - FAT.) I started to wonder if this was my problem. I did some research on switching back and forth but didn't find much that was helpful. I read about a program I could supposedly use to switch drives back and forth but this didn't work. Other sites mentioned that win nt would allow you to switch drives so I tried to install win nt. This produced the same run-around that I got with win 2k. Finally, I read a ms knowledgebase article that explained that you had to hook the hard drives to a computer that is running win nt then take ownership of the drives. Supposedly, I could then change the partitioning system and would be on my way. So, I took the drives up to the server and plugged them in. The server did not recognize the drives despite repeated attempts to get that to happen. I can hear the drives spinning up when they start but the server never saw them. I would try to run disk administrator to see the disks (and hopefully take ownership of them) but disk administrator would always hang during initialization. Finally, I gave up.

Anyone have any suggestions?