Windows 98 install fails when formatting

[Matthew Renna]

Hi everyone,

I have this older machine I'm putting windows 98 on. When I boot off the CD-Rom, everything goes well until setup tries to format the hard disk. When it tries to, it tells me this

Please inset the following disk in drive D (or your CD-ROM drive)
Windows 98 Boot Disk or CD-Rom

I can't continue even thought the windows 98 disc is in the drive.

 

[dextermat]

most likely a defective cd or cd-rom and / or hard drive, needs to be replace .

 

[mgallo848]

How old is the PC? What motherboard is it?

 

[smorizio]

from a working pc make a windows 10 installer usb stick. boot from the usb stick. if you dont need any data on the old pc use diskpart clean command on the old hard drive. when the drive is empty try reinstalling the os. with windows 98 if the mb is amd or nvidia or newer intel chipset mb. you may have to do an f6 custom driver install and intstall the chipset drivers.

 

[mgallo848]

from a working pc make a windows 10 installer usb stick. boot from the usb stick. if you dont need any data on the old pc use diskpart clean command on the old hard drive. when the drive is empty try reinstalling the os. with windows 98 if the mb is amd or nvidia or newer intel chipset mb. you may have to do an f6 custom driver install and intstall the chipset drivers.

He has to delete the partition altogether then stop. A Windows 10 boot disk will want to format the HDD under NTFS. He needs FAT32.

Really need to know what his motherboard is.

 

[Matthew Renna]

from a working pc make a windows 10 installer usb stick. boot from the usb stick. if you dont need any data on the old pc use diskpart clean command on the old hard drive. when the drive is empty try reinstalling the os. with windows 98 if the mb is amd or nvidia or newer intel chipset mb. you may have to do an f6 custom driver install and intstall the chipset drivers.

He has to delete the partition altogether then stop. A Windows 10 boot disk will want to format the HDD under NTFS. He needs FAT32.

Really need to know what his motherboard is.

The motherboard is the ECS P6BAP-A+. It's got a celeron 433mhz, 322megs or something of ram, and a FX 5700 Ultra for the gpu.

 

[mgallo848]

from a working pc make a windows 10 installer usb stick. boot from the usb stick. if you dont need any data on the old pc use diskpart clean command on the old hard drive. when the drive is empty try reinstalling the os. with windows 98 if the mb is amd or nvidia or newer intel chipset mb. you may have to do an f6 custom driver install and intstall the chipset drivers.

He has to delete the partition altogether then stop. A Windows 10 boot disk will want to format the HDD under NTFS. He needs FAT32.

Really need to know what his motherboard is.

The motherboard is the ECS P6BAP-A+. It's got a celeron 433mhz, 322megs or something of ram, and a FX 5700 Ultra for the gpu.

Ok, I figured your MB was going to be a little newer so I was going to suggest a setting that needed to be changed in the BIOS first but that isn't the case with yours.

There were some CD-Roms back in the day that couldn't be used as bootable CD drives. That might be what you're runnning into.

You could look at creating a bootable USB Windows 98 disk and see if that helps. http://www.howtonetworking.com/Windows/bootableusb.htm

 

[Matthew Renna]

not sure what was happening, but instead of starting setup from the cdrom, I tried starting windows 98 with cd-rom support, typed in a bunch of stuff, and it worked.

 

[mgallo848]

I tried starting windows 98 with cd-rom support

Now I remember that procedure. If I remember right there was 4 different options to choose from? They made it a little easier on some of the later Windows 98 SE CD's

 

[Matthew Renna]

I tried starting windows 98 with cd-rom support

Now I remember that procedure. If I remember right there was 4 different options to choose from? They made it a little easier on some of the later Windows 98 SE CD's

Mine has three different options
Start Windows 98 from CD-ROM
Start Windows 98 with CD-ROM support
Start Windows 98 Without CD-ROM support