Trying to reformat system boot floppy error

[Phil Sydney Aust]

Was given a computer, better than my p4. The owners took the sata drive but left the ide drive in it. I think its a duo core type, doesnt even have a vga port had to get a dvi to vga adapter to use my monitor. I
I tried to boot it up and it gives a HAL.dll error.
No problem i thought, i will just boot with a floppy and reformat hdd and load windows.
Using win98 se boot disk.
Boots from floppy and says starting win98 on a command line then says
A:> Type the name of the command interpretor eg C:\ windows\command.com
No matter what dos commands i use it just repeats the request. Cant see dir of a: or c:
Just repeats that request.
Have made 3 boot disks all the same problems. Am using 3.5 floppies.
Have reformatted my old machine heaps of times with no problem but this pc has me beat. Wondering if the later model motherboard has a problem with 98?? boot disk.
I have at my disposal Genuine 98se, xp home disks. Hitting F12 gives me the option to boot from nearly anywhere and i have changed the bios to boot from floppy 1st.

 

[hang-the-9]

Try a new floppy drive.

 

[Phil Sydney Aust]

Thanks hang-the-9.

Re tried with xp home disk and got it to boot this time. Didnt work the first time before i posted. So alls good. Still dont know why the floppy wouldnt work, but didnt need it in the end. My only concern is i wanted 98 on this computer because my laser printer doesnt have updated drivers for xp and i cant print anything without putting it on a flashdrive and going to my old computer. Maybe i could do a dual boot now i have xp on there.

 

[hang-the-9]

Floppy drives and disks are pretty unreliable, I have seen disks work fine in the system they were made on, but fail on other computers because the heads were not aligned exactly so.