Installing Windows 2000 Professional

In this section you will learn how to install Windows 2000 Professional. This tutorial covers the basic steps, which are required for the installation and configurations. There are different methods of installing the Windows 2000 Professional.

There are two basic types of the installation.

1. Fresh Installation

2. Dual Boot Installation

In the fresh installation method, Windows 2000 is installed as the only operating system on a formatted or empty hard disk. In the dual boot installation method Windows 2000 Professional is installed alongside another operating system on the same hard disk such as Windows NT, Windows XP, Windows 98 or Red hat Linux. All the operating systems

are needed to be installed on the separate portions of the hard disk.

Just start from the Windows 2000 Professional installation CD. Make sure that your computer is set to boot from the CD first. To get the grip on Windows 2000 Professional installation and for easy to understand, I have discussed all the installation methods in the following points.

1. Insert the Windows 2000 Professional in the CD-ROM and start the computer and when you are prompted press any key to start the Windows 2000 Professional setup program.
2. Start from the boot disks, insert the disk first and then remaining three floppies when you prompted.
3. Insert the CD-ROM and then at the command prompt type drive:\1386\winnt32.exe and then press Enter or if there is no previous installation on this computer then type drive:\i386\winnt.exe and press Enter, where drives a letter of your CD-ROM drive. Setup starts and begins to inspect your computer’s hardware configurations and load device drivers and other necessary installation files.
4. Press Enter when Microsoft Windows 2000 Professional screen appear.
5. Press F8 to accept the license agreement and continue the installation.
6. Next either creates a new partition by pressing C and deletes the old partitions.
7. Format the partition by using the FAT 32 or NTFS file system and press Enter.
8. Setup formats the partition by the file system you selected and then begins to copy the installation files on your selected drive. After all the installation files copies in the first step, system restarts.
9. After the first restart, GUI interface starts click next to continue the setup. Setup detects and installs the device drivers of specialized mouse and keyboard.
10. When the regional settings appear customize your installation for locale, format, number, currency, time, date and language if necessary. After this does not press start from CD-ROM when your computer restarts.
11. In the personalize dialog box, type your name and your company name. In the product ID dialog box type 25 character key. Press next in the computer name and password dialog box, either accept the default computer name or assign a customize computer name. You can set the password for the local administrator account.
12. In the date and time settings, select the correct data and time. Here you can also specify which time zone you are in, and set the computer to automatically adjust the clock for daylight saving time.
13. Click next setup will detect the networking software and settings, either select the typical to set default network settings for File and print sharing for Microsoft networks or choose the customized settings for your network such as IP address, workgroup or domain name, DHCP server settings etc.
14. During the final stage of installation, setup installs start menu items, registers components, saves settings and removes the temporary files, which were created during the installation. When Completing Windows 2000 Setup Wizard dialog box appears, remove the CD from the CD-ROM and click finish to restart the computer.
15. After the computer restarts, click next in the Welcome to the Network Identification Wizard dialog box. In the users of this computer dialog box, either specifies that user musts enter user name and passwords or select Window 2000 Profession should automatically log on a specific user. Click finish.

In this tutorial, I have covered the basic steps, necessary to install Windows 2000 Professional. You can find the separate tutorials on how to create the Boot Disks, which are necessary for the installing the Windows 2000. You have the option to skip the boot disk creating portion. You can even install the windows without inserting the floppy disks for creating the boot disks.