If you want to start over at this point do the following:
1 ) Use RU bios with HPT 1.25
2 ) make sure your bios is set to what it said in that post
3 ) do not preformat the drive with a win9x bootdisk
4 ) make sure the drive is on the HPT, if that's where you want it, and you're using an 80-conductor cable with the blue end in the controller
5 ) get HPT's 1.25 revision drivers and put it on a floppy
6 ) set boot order in the bios to c,cdrom,x
7 ) install win2k off bootable CD
8 ) hit F6 to load HPT drivers; insert diskette when prompted
9 ) partition and format drive with Win2k's install tools; use NTFS
10) after reboot set boot order to a,scsi,c; set SCSI=HPT
11) see if everything works right
The short answer to your earlier problem is to check and make sure your system device is set to ACPI multiprocessor machine. If it's not, then you will probably have shutdown issues. APM multiprocessor machine should alsow work, but I've seen issues with it before. However, given that the install is futzed now, I'd suggest a full reinstall with the above procedure.