Problems reinstalling 2k

My wife bought a computer from her old work and later figured out she did not have admin priveleges to install new programs. We tried to reinstall 2k by booting from the setup CD, but must have messed something up because now it won't boot at all. It seems to stop at a certain point and beep really loud. I'm obviously a total noob at this so any help is appreciated. I just want to reformat the hard drive and reinstall 2k. Thanks for the help.

 

When is it that the computer beeps loudly and stops?

Also if you are looking to do a fresh install, try booting into the system with a Win98 boot disk, and run fdisk and get rid of the partitions already on there. If you have NTFS partitions, there is a real handy program out there called "Zero" that will take care of that for you.

If you can't get as far as using a boot disk (see above question) then you may have more than OS problems.

 

To add on to what Tap-Out said, the Beep pattern is probably diagnostic of the problem.

Computers will normally use a "beep code" to announce a problem like a dead or missing hard drive or other serious issues that stop the process early on. But different makers use different codes so if you can specify what computer and exactly how many beeps, we can probably give you a good idea what is wrong.

Maybe booting from a floppy and trying to start from there will work but several possible problems would allow a normal floppy boot but not the rest of what you need to do.