Hmm thanks for your help. I'll look those over. I managed to put the freedos usb drivers that worked onto a windows 98 boot disk, rewrote the config.sys and autoexec.bat files, and it fired up and recognized the cdrom and everything, but still no go. Even with smartdrive and a ramdisk the windows install still didn't see the ntfs drive during the preinstall and faulted out. It said it needed a drive at least 500 mb in size and exited. I ended up reformatting the hard drive using fdisk from the boot disk, and then tried to do the install with the now recognized cdrom drive, which fired up, ad began copying files, however now it's frozen on that part, directly after it copies the ntfs files to the c drive. I've tried windows xp pro and home cd's and they both do the same thing.<sigh> So there's still something funky and wrong with the way I'm going about it. Any ideas on that issue? I guess I'll look at the boot disks you mentioned...maybe a different driver for my cd will get it to work.