Francis Markey

Thanks for the reply, pip22. It turned out to be a bit more complicated than that - the BIOS has sufficient USB support (because I can boot from the installation CD in the USB CD drive), but Win2000 installation is unintelligent enough (or perhaps just old enough) to insist on trying to use its own non-existent USB CD support on the first reboot. So I could read the CD the first time round but there was no supported device to reboot from. After hunting for USB-CD support that would work in DOS, I finally solved the issue by taking the hard disk out of the notebook, hooking it up to a computer with an internal CD that could be booted in Win98, copying the Win2000 installation folder to the hard disk then putting the disk back in the notebook and installing Win2000 from the hard disk. Sounds crazy, but it in fact worked painlessly. Case closed.

My son has an Asus notebook with both floppy and CD as external USB drives (there are no internal removable media drives). I am trying to install Win2000 from the bootable CD in place of the Swedish WinXP that is pre-installed, but I run into a Stop 0x000007b (Inaccessible_boot_device) when Win2000 tries to start during the installation. This looks like a missing ATA driver (Intel 82801DPM Ultra ATA Storage Controller). I have system files for the notebook on a CD and have also downloaded from Intel, but Win2000 installation demands special drivers on a diskette, and requires a TXTSETUP.OEM file on the diskette in order to handle the drivers. Where do I find the correct TXTSETUP.OEM? It's not included with the Intel chipset installer. Alternatively, does anyone have a better solution? Grateful for any help. Francis Markey Uppsala, Sweden