Can't boot to Win98 CD

[Muse]

Put together my old Win95 OSR2 box, Tyan Tomcat 1562s with 64 MB RAM and would have been happy enough for a 2nd system but I'm having insurmountable difficulties and decided to install Win98 and then maybe Win98SE if it's not a performance hit. The box has a Creative 8x4x32 CDRW and it works fine except that I can't seem to boot from it. I went in the 4.51g Award BIOS and set the boot sequence to CDROM, C, A and then C, CDROM, A. Makes no difference. I just Fdisked and formatted the whole main drive FAT32 so there's no OS on the machine. Boots to floppy, of course, but when I put a bootable CD in the CDRW drive it won't boot. The drive is recognized before booting (I get a message on the screen about the Creative 8x4x32 drive) but I either get an endless blinking cursor or a message about an unbootable disk, replace disk and hit any key. My only thought now is to Ghost back my Win95 boot partition and try to upgrade to Win98 from within Windows, but I hate to do that. Can someone think of a way I can get this thing to boot from the Windows CD? I installed Win98 from the same CD on a different system a little while ago so I know the disk is good. The backup disk behaves the same. Thanks for any help.

 

[Muse]

Well, I found a workaround. I have some Norton Ghost 2001 boot disks with CDRom support and I booted to one of those and ran the Win98 install CD from there. Unfortunately, my original problem is still there! I can't believe it. My recording balance controls go all the way to the left every time I reboot. What's up?