Impossible time installing Win98se on HD.....

[TheNewGuy]

I'm building my first system, but I'm having one heck of a time installing the OS on the hd. I had problems with IDE cable, and I had to buy another one. Anyways, after starting up the computer and detecting hd and dvd drive, with the startup disk in the floppy, I got this message:

"Win 98 has detected that drive c: does not contain a valid FAT or FAT 32 partition. There are several possible causes.

1. The drive may need to be partitioned. To create a partition on the drive, run FDISK from the msdos prompt.
2. You may be using third party disk partition software. If you are using this type of software, remove the emergency boot disk and restart. Then follow on screen instructions and start from floppy.
3. Some viruses also cause your drive C to not register. Use a virus scanning program."

Ok, after this I tried to type "format", but it didn't work, so I went to the dvd drive and copied the files from there into a win98se directory that I made. Tried running setup, but no go.

After this, I ran FDISK, I kept going with the first option under FDISK. At the end of it, it said to restart the computer, and I did. Once again, the computer started up, detected both the hd and the dvd drive, and went to a setting screen (not in the bios but some sort of system summary screen), and it mentions something about the ide drive being ok, then right below it, it mentions that it cannot find OS. The cursor flashes but I can't do anything else....

Any help as to how to solve this problem is greatly appreciated....

Dave

 

[diogenes571]

In fdisk, did you view the existing partition table first (option 4)? You need to delete every partion on this list using option 3 (that is, assuming you want Windows on only one partition). Then, create a dos partition in option 1 that uses all the space on drive C: Then exit out of fdisk, reboot, and rerun the Windows setup which should format the disk for you and then perform a clean install.

 

[TheNewGuy]

The only problem I'm having right now is that I can't get to dos to do anything. Once it states it can't find an operating system, the cursor flashes, and I can't do anything. This is during some sort of system summary screen...any help to get to dos would be greatly appreciated....as for rebooting, is just hitting reset sufficient, or is there a dos command to quit??

Thanks for all the help...

Dave

 

[Suppafly]

if its an empty drive, there's no dos for you to get to. Make a bootable floppy with another win98 cd and then copy format and all the dos stuff you need to it.. then boot off of it and fdisk c: and format c: then do sys a: c:

or just boot off of a win98 install cd and run through all the options and it will format and install dos and windows for you.