ok, i got the damn thing this far, i'm not giving up. there was a password on my motherboard. i tried taking out the battery, that didn't work, i did the jumper trick, it worked, the password is gone, so i started her up. and it would lock up. i have two hard drives, the newest of the two (wd 13 gig or somthin) was making clicking noises, so i unhooker the power to that one. then, it booted, i could either go to the setup, or if i didn't hit f1, it would say insert bootable media, i made a boot disk from this computer for it, that got me to an a: prompt, but there was no other drives than that. i changed the old hard drive (the original one that is still hooked up to the machine) jumpers from master or slave(forgot) to single. and i booted, it said wd hard drive installed, and i got a c: promp. it accually gave me the menue where you choose safe mode, normal, ect. is said i have missing files, like win.com and stuff. i'd just get a really quick flash of the win 98 screen with the clouds and stuff. i was going to try to re install windows, but it occured to me all i have is still just an a drive and a c drive now, i checked the jumpers on my cd drive, and it was jumed to slave, so i tried jumping it to master, and when it booted, it said wd hard disk installed, and then acer cd rom drive installed, but i couldn't access it. it said invalid drive. so i'm thinking if i can get the drive to work, i could clear the hard disk and reinstall windows with the cd.. so i was wondering what i can do to get the cd drive goin again, to do this, or if you guys don't think i'm doin this right, please help me

WinMe boot disk allows you to access the cdrom. Did you try restoring the registry? Also you shouldn't have to format the h/d, you should be able to reinstall windows over the original.

I just reread your post. Remove the old h/d, set the new h/d to master, set cdrom to slave, attach to the new h/d. Go into bios and do an automatic search ide drives. the pc should see both at boot up. then throw in the boot disk and go from there.

nothin works, i don't know how to create a drive.

i'm to the point now where if i have a cd drive working in it, then i can reinstall windows and that should give it the files its missing

I think it says invalid drive because it was empty. Was there a CD in the drive at the time?

Maybe you don't have the drivers to access the CDROM in CONFIG.SYS or the MSCDEX entry in AUTOEXEC.BAT. Search how to use a CD drive under DOS in the DOS Support Forum, or try to create a Windows 9x boot disk in another computer.