>Thanks Ed,
>
>Very complete. I suspected part of my problem was the BIOS. I'm looking a a new PIII which will solve the problem. I want to run Win2K...and it looks like I'll be ok.
>

Glad I (or more precisely, John Saville's site) could help.

I've had good results with larger IDE drives and older machines by setting up a small (1-4GB) system partition that moderately old BIOSes can handle (NT on most older BIOSes can handle booting as long as the system partition where the boot loader resides is entirely in the first 4GB of the drive) and installing the operating system there. Once the base install is in place with the SP4 ATAPI.SYS, you can partition the remainder of the drive from inside NT using the
NT Disk Administrator utility to create an extended partition from the remainder of the drive (it can see it now, since NT doesn't rely on BIOS services after it starts), and then allocate that partition as a single NTFS volume. Wait to install other software until after you've repartitioned, and install to the nice, fresh (big) NTFS partition. I try to use a fixed size, preallocated swap file on the system partition, and use only one swap file allocation on a physical drive regardless of the number of logical volumes defined out of it. There are slight performance advantages to using FAT16 for a swap file, but I tend to give up the slight performance increase for the added features of NTFS IAC, and for the system partition, the added security alone is more than enough reason to switch to NTFS.