Okay let me start from the beginning, I was asked to help fix the "slow" dinosaur of my mates computer (looking back I never would have). Anyway, it was on Windows XP and was just a SNAIL. So I formatted and clean installed XP. This took about an entire afternoon! Once a fresh XP was loaded it became bogged down again. Slowly then ever, then eventually to give me blue memory overload screen off boot. I could not load XP anymore. So I decided to head back to Windows 98. This is where I went wrong. I put in an old boot disk my mate had laying around. This got to me a dos prompt, however it was on the NTFS based drive. I continued to format C: only to come across the same problem on windows 98 install screen (this drive is setup for a NTFS drive, ect ect). I called my friend who ran me through fdisk, I deleted all known partitions, created a new. However when I went to display info under "system" it stated unknown. I rebooted got back to my dos prompt, however when I try to run anything off the new C: I get the old "About/Retry/Fail". I attempted to run a C: format off my cdrom only to have it sit at 0 (zero) and not move. Am I hopeless, I would really like to get and boot a Windows 98 off this old girl? I would hate to tell my mate I frizzed his only CPU.

"I deleted all known partitions, created a new. However when I went to display info under "system" it stated unknown." By system you imply BIOS ? Here is the rundown again : Make SURE you have a Win98/Win98se startup floppy, allow CD-ROM support. FDISK .... large disk support ok ... delete all partitions ... create a new partition .... make it active ... exit FDISK. FORMAT C: SETUP Best

Oops, forgot to mention : put Win98 CD-ROM in cdrom drive before keying in setup. Some recommend reboot with the floppy after format. Don't know if this is necessary but i always do it that way. Best

Though this is technically not a DOS forum question, maybe you ought to use KILLDISK after booting with a DOS floppy, to wipe out all the crap from the hard drive. You can then FDISK/FORMAT. http://www.killdisk.com

Roger's advice is good. Sometimes a previously used hdd can give problems such as you are experiencing. Particularly when later versions of windows have been used. I would use the low level format facility that can be downoaded from the hdd makers website to totally wipe the hdd and then start again. Roger suggests killdisk, which is probably as good. Good luck - Keep us posted.