I've been searching for a solution to this problem but cannot find anything yet....

I have a fairly new laptop - Intel Centrino (855 chipset) 1.4Ghz with all the toys bells and whistles. I know the silly thing works, and works well because I've had a full install of Linux running on it for over 2 months. It's time to rebuild it though, because I need to have it dual boot Windows/Linux (business reasons).

I pop in the Win2k master disk and boot. The Win2K text screen comes up, it goes through it's loading every driver under the sun routine, finishes that, and then says "Loading Windows 2000". The blue text screen is replaced by a black screen, and the CDROM spins down. That's it. That's as far as it gets.

I've tried connecting an external monitor, and it displays everything the LCD does... including the nice black screen.

So.. any suggestions, ideas etc? What's going wrong? What is causing the install to come to a screeching halt?

Probally bad video drivers, try booting into safe mode.

Faranth is right; here's more detail. Windows 2000 pre-dates your video chipset, so it was probably detected incorrectly. Go to Safe Mode and install the Windows default SVGA drivers via the Device Manager then, either off your PC's driver disk or off the Internet, download and install the correct Win2k drivers.

Ok, but how the heck do you start a Win2K install in safe mode on a computer that doesn't have Windows installed on it - and has never had Windows installed on it? (this computer has only ever had Linux on it from day one) It's not like I can press F8 and select Safe Mode from a menu... at least not that I can see... I didn't know there was a safe mode option that you could use during an install.

I've done a bunch of Googling, looking for a way to install in safe mode and come up with nothing useful. So... what's the secret?

so did you have the hardrive partitioned or were you just installing it on the same partition as linux.
Can you still boot to the linux os

I started the process with Linux still installed on the drive - the plan was to use the Win2k partitioner to wipe the drive and do a clean install. At that point I could still boot to Linux. When I ran into the problems I've described above, I thought I'd try with a clean disk.

Pulled out my Partition Magic8 bootable CD I created a while back, and booted up the laptop. Wiped the partitions and started fresh with a 6 GB NTFS partiton, a 10 GB FAT32 partition, a 1 GB Linux swap partition, and a 22 GB Linux native partition. Rebooted. Popped in my Win2k CDROM, booted again, and got the exact same thing... it hums along loading all the drivers, then says Loading Windows 2000 and the screen goes black... and stays that way.

I've DLed SP4 for Win2k and have tried slipstreaming it into the Win2k SP3 version I have... same result. So, it doesn't seem to be service pack related. Checked the Intel website, and the Centrino is officially supported on Win2k Pro SP3 (the version of Win2k I have)... So I have to assume that at least in a bare minimum VGA video mode it should be able to run/load.

So, at this point it's a no go... and I'm still stumped with this.. why is the screen going black? I assume there's some HW detection going on (based on what I've read on the MS Knowledge Base) and it's hanging up on it. Don't know what. I've turned absolutely all of the peripherals off that I can in the BIOS and still the same results. I'm out of ideas.

I'm stumped ,I only ever tried to load win2000 once on a computer of mine ,and it was server 2000 and I had video problems ,and gave up .and whent back to win98 ,