lol, i forgot about this. It ended up being a corrupt promise driver (my HD was on an onboard promise controller). I got it working, but then switched it over to a regular IDE channel b/c i haven't gotten my linux install working with the promise controller (ok, i haven't tried THAT hard, but it's not easy either). So yeah, that problem is stopping a lot of my progress in linux, to say the least. (since ALL of my files are on the promise controller, except OS files).

"XP" is an upgrade to win2k in one sense or another, yes, but not in the sense that a service pack is an upgrade. They share lots of code etc, but not too many people would call them the same OS, (though they are both NT 5.x). There are plenty of people who dualboot w/ xp and 2k, promise, i'm one of them now...

it will overwrite if you install on the same partition (well, not necessarily, but basically it will unless you're good and do some directory switching, etc.) but not if you have it on a different partition.