Built My New System

And stuck on reinstalling Windows 2000.

2000 always has a hard time when trying to mess with a partitioned drive over 137GB. Ohh well, I need to format it again. Remember that 2000 does not contain a quick format mode so I'm stuck waiting a very long time to format even 70GB...

And now I'm on my upstairs computer.

Ouch; doing a full format takes forever on large HDs. Good thing you only need to do this once when a new HD installed.

I hope this OS installation doesn't give you more headaches

I just got an IRQ_NOT_LESS_THAN_OR_EQUAL_TO stop error on installation.

I hope the RAM is good. I'll diag it when I get up tomorrow. Damn problems!

As an update: I've got everything working now. The P5B doesn't seem to want to automatically set the DRAM voltage high enough so I manually set it.

I'm using Crucial Ballistix RAM that needs 2.2V (And yes, I know that's high).

Damn you must have some high performance ram to require 2.2v.

Is that the stock volts required for that ram?

Yes it is. It is just PC-5300 stuff. Nothing that special. I really don't know why the voltage must be that high. Anyway, I'm going to test the stability soon and then try some overclocking.

good to hear. Wow, win 2k. man that thing is ancient. I love win 2k for a long time because of the stability but it's just such a pain waiting it to boot. Truthful though, I think Win 2k is more stable than XP.

I agree Win 2k is a good OS. I had a copy, but it disappeared when I moved, so now I am back to XP.

Win2k is basically Windows XP. XP is NT5.1 and 2000 is NT5.0. Even Microsoft couldn't bring themselves to give it anything over a revision. Vista will be NT6.0. Even 2003 was NT5.2.

I wouldn't waste my time installing Win2K! XPpro is the only way to go. I hated waiting 2 hours for a hard drive format and then having a stop error at 99%. Forget that!

And you would rather do a quick format and not catch the error? Even when I install XP Pro on a new computer, I always do a long format the first time.

I'd proably get that 32GB SS HDD for a boot device. Why long format when you can run scandisk and quick format with xp? I guess I'm just biased to xp pro.

I know this is probably a dumb question, and I take sarcastic comebacks well, but couldn't you format the partition you wanted to put 2K on with gparted? I know it does fat32 and ntfs. Plus it has a live cd. Just a thought.

Can you explain why you do the long format?

No, I won't do a sarcastic comment.

I do long formats to check the drive for errors. A simple scandisk won't find problems like the long format unless you do a deep scan... in which case the format would take the same amount of time.

What's the smallest partition you allow for your system drive, taking into account the time it takes to LONG format?

Do you LONG format the secondary partion as well? Do you even do two partitions on the same fixed disk?