I have a Win2K professional OS on my PC. It has an 80GB hard drive with a SINGLE partition. It has been running fine for past 5 years. I wanted to install XP as well on my computer.

As first step, I took a backup of all my data. I then ran a defrag on the remaining 10GB of data. After the Defrag was done, I did notice that the system files were spread across the drive in small chunks [non-contiguous].

I then downloaded two freeware partition managers :

CutePM and EASEUS.

The user interface of EASEUS was incredible. I tried resizing the C drive to three, two NTFS and one FAT32 data partition. When I clicked apply, it stated that the system should be restarted. When I clicked yes, it gave a failed error STATING that the system couldn't be restarted.

Then I used CutePM, which asked me to create a BOOT CD. I did that. However, I had to write the CPM.ISO file manually using XPCD Burner Pro.

I then restarted the PC from the start menu. And then the unexpected happened.

What I can see after restart are as follows :

During boot, it correctly detects all drives, viz : DVD, CD Writer, HDD.
I can see a text stating F2 for setup, F12 for... and so on.
The keyboard doesn't work. So, I can't have any of these options selected.
There is no beep, which I would have expected from POST.

I have AMI bios.

Can anyone please help me understand the problem or can anyone suggest a solution.

Thanking all in anticipation.Don't know why the keyboard wouldn't work. Sounds unrelated to the issue. Try another PS2 keyboard (Not USB) and start over with the XP CD and see if you can reformat the drive. That's where I would start.