Neverending restarts...

check and see if the 'reset' key is stuck, i had this problem once, a peice of chicken got stuck in there and kept restarting the machine.

a piece of chicken cabrone? No, neither computers have reset buttons, just power buttons...

In general, unless you take some kind of steps in advance, only baby OS Windows 98 likes doing things like this (i.e. installing in one computer and then moving the HDD to another one and then trying to boot it....)

You would think a more mature OS like Windows 2000 or Linux would like this even more then Windows 98 but I am afraid that you would be wrong.

As I noted, Windows 2000 has a tool called sysprep which can help you round this:

http://www.microsoft.com/windows2000/downloads/tools/sysprep/default.asp

Or get ahold of "Emergency Rescue Disk Commander" which'll allow you to boot from a cdrom, then load the registry and remove any keys relating to which IDE/SCSI controller to use whilst loading...

The program is created by the same guys who brought us NTFS4DOS... No win2k user should be without it!

.02$

Just a long shot, but if you boot from the Windows 2000 CD (Or floppy disk installation set), you can access your "Recovery Console" by choosing the "Repair" option during Windows 2000 pre-installation.

A Windows XP installation disk(s)/disc should also work, I would imagine.

In the recovery console, you can access your hard disk for the old computer. What you will want to do is delete a file called "driver.cab" which will basically reset your hardware configuration data.

You'll find this in C:\WINNT\Driver Cache\i386\Driver.cab

This will cause Windows 2000 to literally boot without any drivers (including chipset.. etc), and then Plug 'n Pray will take over upon Windows boot/logon... In theory, allowing you to proceed to the operating system at the very least. From here, it should finish re-installing all of your hardware automatically.

Please take into consideration how long this will take, so you will have to wait a bit for Windows 2000 to finish booting and logging on to the desktop... Just a warning so you don't get frustrated and reset it.

If this rebooting is caused by Windows 2000 expecting certain devices that aren't there anymore (Because you copied/relocated another W2k installation to this computer) , then this should theoretically fix it.

i dunno, this computer is driving me crazy! It wont boot to floppy even though it works. I dont see anything in the bios either to change the order. I installed win98 on there and it worked semi-fine. My win98 cd is now cracked and anything having to do with the internet has been mucked up. I made another copy of my cd a while ago but for some reason its not the same.

Ok, I know this thread is years old, but for crissakes, don't delete the driver.cab file!!!! That would rob the system of its *entire* hardware base, not just its essential drivers. It would absolutely not be able to recover from that. All NT based Windoze are extremely exacting about their hardware environment; Changing even minor things can make it throw a fit; plopping a 2000 or XP disk into another system is totally unworkable. Yes, you could get away with that in win 9x, but that was just a DPMI shell, no matter how much Bill tried to convince us it was a real OS. *nix will do exactly the same thing as NT; Not blue screen, but Kernel Panic. This is a direct result of the layered architecture, and the layers closest to the hardware are customized during the installation, so no two are the same.