I am having lots of problems with installing this anything on this machine.

The machine works the guy I got it from took a working hdd out of it and i played around on it before shelling out the fifty bucks for it. He got it from work with no disks or cd drive. I tried various hard drives with loaded OS's and it wouldn't boot. When that didn't work I loaded a cd drive as a slave to a blank (and even a pre loaded drive) and when I tried to boot from the cd of win2k and xp Pro (both legit copies) it tells me that it isn't a system disk. I have a network setup is there anything I can do with the machine to try and get it to load that way? TIA

Welcome to the PCHF Brad,

If you check the motherboard and find the model number, we can find out find out if you need any 3rd party drivers to load before windows.

thanks
the sticker on the motherboard says on line 1 : sp#269014-001 p574b0c9vn520r as#263053-001

line 2: dg#011361-000

hrmm...unfortunately that's just for their records.
Is it possible to take a photo of the inside of the case?

I found compaq's page with all the win2k drivers for the system. What would be the best way to boot them so I can install my OS?

fixed my problem I had a bad ata cable, good enough the drives could be seen but not so good they could be read properly. gotta love it when you can fix things with spare parts.