Well, I got it to load win98 after taking out everything, (which I was originally trying to avoid, lesson learned? nooooooooo..)
When I was upgrading to 2k I got into the same mess where I was 6-7 posts ago.
The only thing I have in is 40G WD, ATI Radeon7500, win98 is running fine but 2k freezes the system way at the end of set up where it is "Removing the temporary files" at that point I hear a constant beep from the system speaker!!! I guess it's a hardware failure, but what?
I have formatted this disk many time with format.com and using WD Data life guard. The only thing I can think of is that if HD has EZ BIOS installed on the drive. I used to know the procedure to remove it but forgot.
Please share your ideas, now it's personal.