Thanks for your reply. I only have one cd-r left, so I want to be as sure as possible what to do before burning it. So let's chat a bit more first :-) I had tried putting sata in ahci mode already, but it freezes in exactly the same place. That should remove the IDE abstraction, and there would be no sign of LBA48 to confuse it. In ahci mode, I'd expect it to get to the next stage and tell me there are no hard disks found, rather than just crashing (I can't actually remember what win2k does if there are no drives connected). My expectation might be wrong though. I've tried with two different hard disks: a 320GB sata disk which is brand new, and is partitioned into 3 parts: I want win2k to go on partition 1 which is 80GB, and I have since put ubuntu on partition 2 which is 40GB, and the third partition is currently unused, but will eventually be for all my software and files. The second disk I tried with is my 80GB sata backup hard disk (with a single 80GB partition). I tried booting the install cd with this drive connected, specifically because it was smaller, and within the 128GB limit of LBA. But the installer behaves exactly the same. My previous win2k PC was set up almost exactly the same with an 80GB sata hard disk, with sata configured as ide. It's hard to guess exactly what the difference is that's causing it to halt.