Ok guys, heres a good one for you,
how can i, install win 98 on a seperarate harddrive going into another machine, using our xp machine. we run to harddrives presently, on master, and one slave, am i able to unhook slave and put blank, formatted separate drive in its place and fully install 98 on that drive? when i tried this, it says i need to do this using ms-dos prompt, but i do not know procedure or commands once i am in dos. talk to me guys, cause i know i'm sooooo close. thanx:-}

You should really install 98 with the drive in the machine it will reside on. Otherwise you'll have all of the hardware elements of the "XP" machine written to the registry.

It can be done;

I would suggest disconnecting both the XP and existing slave drive(s) from the master and slave "slots" and run the "new" drive in it's place as the master *and only* drive. If it's 98SE you're installing, set the machine (in bios) to have the cdrom somewhere in the boot sequence. If it's 98 first edition, boot with a bootdisk.

Once the O/S is installed, and BEFORE you shut down that drive for the LAST time in the "XP" machine/chassis;

Open Regedit and navigate to the key:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Enum

Right click on the Enum folder icon and choose Delete, OK on the confirm. Close out Regedit. Shut down windows and pull out the drive.

What this does, is clear all the old hardware settings for the "XP" machine/chassis.
When you boot this drive as C: in the new machine , windows will run it's Hardware/PnP detector to find all your new hardware (mobo, video card, controllers, etc.). Load the drivers as required , and your new machine should hum right along with the new chassis and all your familiar software.
AND , , ,NO confusion about settings for equipment that isn't connected anymore, thus no double registry entries.

AmyJ, I would just like to add this to Dan Penny's excellent advice.

I suspect that you are attempting this because the other PC doesn't have a CD Drive. If this is the case, Copy the Win98 Directory from the CD onto the HD, then (after rebooting with a Win98 bootdisk) type at the A:\> prompt:

SYS C: (enter)

This will make the drive bootable in the other PC. Remove the HD from the XP machine, install it into the other PC & bootup. At the C:\> prompt, navigate to the Win98 Directory & type:

setup (enter)

Follow the prompts from there.

HTH

Dave

Ok, will keep those helpful options in mind. Oh my hubby filled me in on all the details of what he did himself this morn, so here it goes:

he had the empty, I mean totaly,no partitions no nothing hooked up to our macine and set it as slave, he copied the contents of the entire win98 cd to drive D, the empty drive, that went smoothly. then he tried to do the install and it start to do it and then it stops and tells him that setup has been cancelled due to possible downgrade, it thinks we want both xp and 98 on one unit, but tells him he can do the setup in ms-dos. well, we don't know how to do that, please any pointers for the future or a site that i can get my lists of proper commands so i can reeducate myself