Ok getting somewhere. I loaded up a stock boot.ini from another system and got this half way into booting.

no one?
I know this has to be something with the boot.ini

Did you try to boot from the old card (having the new card plugged in) and installing the driver from there?

h-a-l-9000 wrote:

Did you try to boot from the old card (having the new card plugged in) and installing the driver from there?

That is a very good idea, sadly I already tried it last night. It did not work. I even installed both the cards drivers too.

Also I can't boot from a CD (ide or sata) with a hdd attached to the card. I have to boot up the system without a hdd and then plug the hdd in when the windows install starts. I get a message about the hdd right before the installer starts. I'll post exactly what it say tonight.

Are you using latest drivers for Floppy ?

agent_x007 wrote:

Are you using latest drivers for Floppy ?

Yes. I tried older drivers too.

This may not be applicable to your situation, as your are using a SIL3114 with its own driver rather than the native IDE driver, but it might be worth a look.

Windows 2000 seems to have issues with LBA48 support (for drives greater than 127 GB) up to service pack 2 (inclusively).

Are you using a third party partitioning/format tool before installing ?

You might want to look at the following links and/or try a smaller disk .

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/305098
http://www.msfn.org/board/topic/75713-48-bit- … on-win2k-setup/
http://www.hardwareheaven.com/community/threa … on-limit.79706/

That's a good think to bring up, but if that was the problem then why would the VIA card work with the same hdd? Maybe the sil driver don't have lba support?
Also I'm using the formatting the hdd with the windows installer.