Windows 2000 new install hangs... why?

I'm in the process of rebuilding my desktop pc and I had some issues
with the old drive and W2K install... some dlls were missing and the
drive was getting flaky. I had too much junk on the drive and I
started deleting programs and must've deleted some necessary files by
mistake. In the interim, I bought a fresh new 40 gig (root) drive and
proceeded to start over, thinking once I get it running, I'll pull any
usefull files off the old 40 gig drive and then reformat that as a
slave along with my 120 gig main slave.

So, the problem is, the system is hanging in the install, telling me
to wait while "Setup is inspecting your hardware configuration..." and
it never gets past that point.

I formatted the HDD with a W98 boot floppy, did the fdisk, then
formatted the HDD but did not install system files. The machine
boots, recognizes the fact that there's a HDD, CDROM, and Floppy, and
asks me if I want to boot from the CD. Wouldn't that be the logical
choice? So I hit Enter and then I get the message noted above. Tried
this numerous times, even left it alone for 3 hours... no change,
black screen with that silly message.

So I'm wondering... should my boot sequence be Floppy, then HDD-0,
then CD? And I'm also wondering if I should try leaving the boot
floppy in the A: drive and maybe there's a way to either boot the CD
from the floppy or possibly copy some key startup files from the CD to
the root drive. Note that my old HDD drive isn't connected, and for
kicks, I tried it only to get the error on the dlls again.

The motherboard is a Soyo Dragon Plus! and the CPU is AMD 1800+, the
memory is a 512 stick, the video card is an ATI Radeon 8500DV... and
all of this stuff was working fine until I screwed up on the program
removal, so I don't think its a hardware issue.

Its been so long since I did a freshin install of W2K that I may be
missing something obvious, so I'd appreciate a nudge in the right
direction. Even a shove :). Thanks in advance for any/all help!

Mike
.

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