I live in the sticks and have acquired one of those satellite modems (starband). It screws your computer up pretty bad. At least, everything works pretty okay as long as you will never use your computer on any other network. I use my computer on gobs of networks. This starband stuff got things so messed up, that a regular dialup would not work. I ended up having to wipe my hard drive and reinstall win2000. I have an old box that hasn't been turned on for a coupla years. It has linux on it. I made the box with ultra compatible stuff just so it would be real easy to put linux on it. Now I'm thinking I should put my win2000 on it, install the starband stuff on there, and have that box act as the gateway to my other computers. (Note: the starband stuff requires a windows box. Their special drivers have some sort of proprietary compression that makes their stuff go about 20 times faster.) So I put the win2000 CD in and re-boot the computer. Well, the computer doesn't recognize the CD-ROM. I set the bios to boot from the CD, but I think it needs some drivers or something first. So it cannot read from the CD until the CD drivers are loaded. But those drivers are probably on the CD. What's the trick here?
Couple of years old huh. The CD may not be Plug and Pray. Do you still have the initial installation software for the CD? It should have came on Floppy. If not, do you know the manufactor? You can get a drivers disk downloaded for there or from drivers.com These drivers are usually small enough to fit on a floppy. Once you have it, you can install it through the control panel. (PS, it sounds to me like Win2K was installed you just can't access the CD right?)
It seems to me that Win2k needs to boot from the CD. That means that nothing else can be running before-hand. How can I make a driver for the CD run before a boot from the CD? I'm think there must be a trick I don't know of, or Win2k just isn't going to go onto this box.
A friend of mine pointed out that there are four "floppy disk images" on the CD to make it so you can boot from the floppy enough so that you can then run the rest from the CD. Going to look into this a bit.
From my experience, and do not get discouraged, if you have old box the win2000 will run a lot slower than for example win 98 or ME. And some of the software will not work until you get upgrade patch. I had set up Win2000 based network and internet sharing at home and it was running so slow tht I had to go back to Win98. I think that win2000 has some additional package security checking that it slows down all the network. Think twice before going to win2000 on old PC.