Hello im new here. but onto my problem.
I have a pentium 3 laptop an ibm.
It had windows 98 on it and i wanted to upgrade to 2000 professional.
I put the disk in and restarted during the installation of 2000 it ran into some problems and forced me to shut it down.
Now whenever I boot up it gives me the option to select either
Microsoft windows 2000 professional setup or
microsoft windows as the operating system to start if i select microsoft windows which is windows 98
it goes to a microsoft registry checker screen and then comes up with a promt witht the title
"You have restore a good registry"
in the promt it says "Windows found an error in your system files and restored a recent backup of the files to fix this problem. Press enter to restart your computer." I click enter and it restarts go and choose the same operating system and it does the same thing over and over again. I tried to run in safe mode with the command promt but that didnt work and it went to this screen first. I have no disks in the computer and would like to remove that 2000 pro setup thing from the o/s select menu aswell as have my windows 98 work again.
I would greatly appriciate any help , thanks.

well, im to assume that you selt it to install on the same drive, but to leave the Win98 installation in tact. You could try to remove the win2000 files from the hard drive using the recovery console, then put a 98 startup disk in and when you arrive at the "C:\" prompt type chkdsk. You might have no choice but to reformat in the long run, but that is a last ditch effort.

What I would just format the whole HD and just do a clean install of Windows2000, unless you need Windows98, then I'm sorry.

Do a drive wipe not just a format. A drive wipe is a destructive data removal. I have had to do this to several computers to make windows install correctly.
There are sevral levels of drive wipes. A quick wipe which makes one pass. A DoD wipe which makes 7 passes, and a Gutman Wipe which makes 38 passes. Unless you are Black Helicopter paranoid this is way over the top. One pass will do.
I like a product call Digital Dolly 1.0. It has over a dozen hard drive utilities and runs from a RAM drive and does not need an OS.
For a simple drive wipe I recommend Kill Disk. It is a freeware utility that can run from a floppy or CD.