Installing Windows 2000 Professional OS

I'm on a mini keyboard and an iPad right now — I looked at the sticky at the top of the forums and saw that it was not only for XP but I didn't have any backup files or any discs other than the windows 2000 install disc. I'm trying to install this OS on a work computer. I'm not sure about the specs but I can tell you it's an IBM ThinkPad and it has stickers: intel inside pentium 4 and a "designed for windows xp" sticker. It's a farily old laptop. Here's my issue: My boss installed linux on this computer (I've NEVER used linux before and it wasn't as user friendly as windows has been to me, auto detecting CDs and hardware plugged into it, etc) and I was having issues so he said just install windows 2000 on it with this disc. I've tried twice now currently waiting on the "Please wait while Setup formats the partition" screen. The rest of the screen says C: Unformatted or Damaged 57202 MB on 54353 MB Disk 0 at Id 0 on bus 0 on atop. At the bottom it says "Setup is formatting" The two times before I tried it stalled/got stuck/hanged at 95 percent. I tried using google for about 2 hours now looking for a solution but none of the other forum posts I found were useful. The formatting is currently at 80% while I'm typing this and I just KNOW it's going to hang again. Any help with this issue is toooootally appreciated.

Give this a try.

Get Darik's Boot And Nuke (DBAN).
Click on Download.
Get DBAN 2.2.6 Beta for CD-R and DVD-R media. which is a .iso file of a bootable CD.
Use your burner software (not the built in XP burner) to create a bootable CD from the .iso file. You don't burn the file itself to a CD, you use it as input a burner software that recognizes it and know how to create a CD from it. There is a good freeware burner called ImgBurn which will do this if what you have will not.

DBAN will wipe the drive and make it unformatted, unallocated, RAW.

Boot the CD.
Once it's ready, type autonuke and press Enter.
Let it run for 5 minutes or so then remove the CD, put the Win 2000 install CD in and power down.
Power up and try the install again.
This time you will have to create a new partition. Take the default size which should be the entire drive.
Then you format it, do a Quick Format if possible and see if it completes and the install continues.

Basic steps are here: Installing Windows 2000 Professional
With pictures is here: Windows 2000 Professional Install Guide

Thanks for the response but I left the laptop on and it turns out it wasn't hanging. It took about 5 hours to go from 95 to 100%. Only to find out that the partition was damaged even though I completely deleted all partitions previously on it. Must be something wrong with the drive? It's pretty old. Oh well. Thanks for trying though.