Win2K won’t delete boot partition

I’m installing a clean copy of Win 2K server on computers that previously ran NT 4.0 server. The disk had multiple partitions and I wanted to delete all of them and start fresh. During the W2K install, I successfully deleted all but the boot/system partition (c:), but when I attempted to delete it, the D key acted as if it had quit working. I quit the install, changed keyboards, but the same thing happened again. I quit again and used fdisk to delete the remaining partition. This has happened on both HP and Dell computers. I don’t remember NT 4 having this idiosyncracy.
Is there a way to make Win 2K install delete an existing boot/system partition?