I Installed Mandrake 10 several months ago on 2 pc's.(both duel booting with lilo.) One WinXP and the other Win2000) Everything was fine I just haven't had the time to learn all thats needed to make the switch so I am removing Mandrake from one of the PC's and will play around on the other (XP). On the PC with Mandrake and Win2000 I mistakenly reformatted the partitions with partition magic 8 that linux was installed on before removing the boot loader and tried to reboot. Of course it wouldn't reboot. This PC originally had Millinium on it but was removed when the harddrive went bad and Win2000 pro was installed with the new harddrive. (I did not do that installation) I seem to have tried everything to get the pc to boot to win2000 with no luck. I have other partitions with data on them that I really don't want to loose. So i decided that I would just reformat "C" and then reinstall win2000. So I started the reinstall proceedure and I am able to get to where "C" has been reformatted and setup copies files to the windows installation folder and it gets to "this part of setup is complete" and says pc will reboot please remove floppy from "A" ...which i do. Then I get an error on bootup that says "Invalid boot Diskette... Insert boot diskette in A" or an error that says "Non-System disk or disk error...replace and press any key when ready." What does this mean?

my first partition is 47mb and I just reformatted that to FAT32. This partiion is inactive and is showing (OS/2 Boot Manager)
C, D, E, and F are all formatted NTFS
Earlier I tried to run Fdisk/mbr record (when I still had an operating system on the drive) but I'm not quite sure how to do that. When I use the Fdisk floppy I try and get to "C" by typing SYS C: \mbr but I get an error that says "Parameter format not correct-C:"
I made a win2000 boot disc with the Files NTDETECT.com NTLDR and a boot.ini file but I'm not sure that I had the boot.ini configured correctly. So when I use this floppy I got an error that says the "ntoskrnl.exe is corrupt or missing."
here is the ini configuration that i used:

[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINNT
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINNT="Microsoft Windows 2000 Professional" /fastdetect


I tried using the repair console to fix this to no avail. (before i reformatted the "c" drive) These are some of the things that I have tried so far. Any ideas anyone?
I have the original Millinium Cd and the Win2000 Cd.
Should I be using a millinium start-up or Win2000 or does it make a
difference?

I have not been able to start the windows setup from the cd-rom. I have to start the setup with floppys and then use the cd. I'm not sure whether this matters or not just thought to mention it. The setup fails anyhow.

I'm sure it is probably something very simple. I am just completely clueless at this point and I realize that I have totally gone about this the wrong way and made things way more difficult that it should have been.

Where would be the best place to start from here?
Any ideas?

Thanks

MP

well it was something silly. Somehow the bios got changed and there was only boot to floppy enabled. The second and 3rd options to boot were disabled somehow. As soon as boot to harddrive was enabled upon restart windows finished installing and everything is fine other than the usual things to install upon a reinstall.

MP