I PURCHASED A LOT OF EIDE HARD DRIVES DUE TO BE INSTALLED IN A MASS STORAGE UNIT I AM BUILDING. THE OPERATING SYSTEM IN THIS STORAGE IS TO BE 2000 SERVER. ALL ARE FORMATTED WITH NT. THE 2000 SERVER INSTALLATION DISC IS UNABLE TO OVERRIDE NT, THEREFOR I CANNOT FORMAT THESE DISCS. BEEN THROUGH THE SETUP ROUTINE SEVERAL TIMES WITH NO LUCK. ANY SUGGESTIONS ?

Hello Dave, and welcome to BleepingComputer.
Have you tried booting from the W2k CD and deleting the partition and then formatting the drives?
There is a hard drive utility I use and like that will do this for you. Digital Dolly 1.0. It boots to a RAM drive so you do not even need an OS.

w2k will not boot over nt. tried to install on friend's system - prompt said as much. this drive i am trying to load with w2k server has two nt operating systems on it. tried to use the download mentioned in your response - no luck - would not boot. downloaded it to empty drive, burned it to cd, loaded it into cd drive and started system. went through initialization, then to choice of nt systems. am i not doing somethin ?

One you have boot to the CD you should be able to go to the partition management utility and simply delete the partition then create a partition (NTFS format) and format the drive.
Have you tried this in the Disk Management, in the Administrative Tools?

EVERYTHING IS WORKING NOW. WENT THROUGH THE STANDARD FORMAT OF INSTALLING THE SYSTEM, TWICE BEFORE, WHEN FIRST REBOOT OCCURS, MESSAGE READ"PRESS ANY KEY TO BOOT FROM CD", NO KEYS PRESSED, SYSTEM WENT TO ALREADY INSTALLED NT'S. THIS TIME AROUND, IT DID WHAT IT WAS SUPPOSED TO. THANKS VERY MUCH FOR YOUR ASSISTANCE.

Nice to see it worked out. Welcome to BC.