however the despro I have got, has no such partion, and there is nothing in the bios that should be upsetting win2kpro, I have looked throughly.
I find it strange, cause when I had the machine it had nt4 workstation on it, so i tohught great, ill wipe this and just stick win2k on it, no dice.
There was a certain type of early power-management that would upset Win2k badly enough that it wouldn't install cleanly. Forget which it was. I remember I had to apply a BIOS update to my old P1 and then disable all power management features. (I don't remember if the BIOS update was for the power-management or to enable larger HDs, though!)
Also, a faulty CD ROM drive will cause Win2k to install corrupt. (Seems it doesn't actually check the integrity of the files as it is copying them to the HD) I spent a couple hours chasing that problem, once, as well. ;-)