Help with win98

ok so i got this huge problem here it goes. So i got this computer trying to run windows 98 it starts and located all of my installed hardware and then i pres ESC to continue after a few minutes a screen pops up saying starting win98 then it say boot from hard drive or option 2 from cd-rom and i start with cd-rom and with cd-drive support then microsoft(R) thing start and then this pops up A:\ and nothing about windows loads up and when i type c:\ it say somethin about abor, retry, fail? and i donw know what to do my computer was working fine i have the windows 98 cd but does not start anything please help me

 

I am working from my old memory here.

You said you have the Win 98 CD. Do have the 3.5 inch floppy that goes with it? You are going to need BOTH. If you don't have the floppy disk, you could be screwed.

 

no man i dont have the floppy i did not get it its just the cd but nothing elese

 

Since you do not have a floppy drive, the A:> prompt is useless (with the exception of those that have created a bootable 98/Me CD that emulates the floppy drive*). The C:> prompt will give you errors if the drive is not partitioned and formatted with FAT32 or FAT16.

If you have a bootable Win98 CD, and you're installing 98 for the first time...choose to boot from the CD with CD support. At the DOS prompt, type in the drive letter assigned to the CD drive...which will most likely be D or E if it creates a ramdrive. So, if the CD drive is assigned E, then type in 'E:' and press enter (without quotes).

Then, at the E:> prompt, type in 'setup' and press Enter (again without quotes).



* If your bootable CD drive emulates the floppy, both the CD drive letter and the A:> would show the same information about the disk, but would still be two different "drives".

 

ok so i did what u said and typed D:\ cause thats my drive then this starts something about system registry and press Enter to continue or something else, so i press enter and then this is what i get;

Cannot create a temporary directory If you have HPFS or NTFS installed on your hard drive you will need to create an MS DOS boot partition to set up Windows.

D:\

And i cannot press anything or type anything looks like it freezes here or im just to bad of a noob.

 

one more thing that i think is that probably something happened to my hard drive cause when it wants to start windows 98 and gives me choices i go to start from hard drive it goes to this screen

_


and this thinh blinks and blinks and blinks and nothing happens

 

If the drive has partitions on it, you can get rid of them using FDISK from the CD.

After you've booted from the disk and chose the command prompt with CD drivers, change to the CD drive and type in FDISK and hit enter. Follow thru the menus to get rid of any partitions. NTFS partitions will show up as NON DOS.

 

this is what i get after typing FDISK

No fiked disks present

 

That's what I am starting to think.

In addition to ddp's question, what size of hard drive are we talking here? Cuz if it's over 137GB in size (using 48bit LBA), chances are your old motherboard isn't going to detect it. Not unless there's a BIOS update for that board to add support for larger hard drives.