what can i do to get round this error? i installed windows on a different pc then put the hd into the laptop it came out of and now it says I/0 disk error remove disk and restart? em..... help?!! regan

Boot the laptop with a 98 bootdisk. At the a:\> prompt type fdisk and enter. Y to large disk support if asked and then option 4. Exactly what does it say?

By the way, I'm assuming that you are trying to end up with '98 running on you laptop. "Installing" 98 on that drive is not the way to do this. What you need to od (assuming the laptop has no CDROM or floppy) is to put the laptop drive into the second machine, partition and "format/s" the drive, to make it bootable, and then, copy the \win98 folder from your CD to a directory on the laptop drive. I usually just name it \win98, just like on the cd. Then, "stick" the drive back into the laptop, boot it, and run setup from there. If you are getting this IO error, it may mean that you are trying to use a drive that for some reason the laptop can't handle.

the laptop may be using a different addressing scheme for the drive: LBA, CHS, etc. WILL POST FOR FOOD.

whats a different address scheme? any way of gettin round that? well i first riped out the laptop hard drive and put it into my desktop pc with one of thoes adapters then fdisked it installed win 98. it booted up nice when it was in the desctop pc but when i put it back into the laptop it came up with this error. the laptop doesnt have a floppy or cdrom. regan

The bios in one computer may be seeing the drive differently than in the other. Sometimes that causes the boot sector to be in a different place so that it won't boot up on one of the computers. I asked for fdisk, option 4, results in order to compare the total disk space and total partition space. Any difference between the two may indicate the drive is being seen differently. But since there's no floppy drive or cdrom I guess you can't do that. To avoid the problem of the boot sector being in the wrong place it's best to partition (fdisk) the drive on the computer on which it is to be used. But again, no floppy or cdrom. Since it's the cmos ID of the drive that determines its partition you need to make sure the drive is seen the same way in both computer. Unfortunately even an AUTO setting may vary between two computers. So you may have to manually enter the cylinders, heads and sector (C/H/S) info for the drive into cmos. If those are the same for both computers then you should be able to partition it on either one. Once you get it partitioned correctly, do the format c:/s to make it bootable. Then, as name says, create a win98 directory on the drive and copy the contents from the win98 folder on the cd into it. Then put it back in the laptop, boot it up and at the c:\> type c:\win98\setup and enter to start the installation. If you get a memory error you'll need to create a config.sys file with a line that loads himem.sys. I'm not sure if the setup process will need it or not. If you get that error post back and we'll tell you how to do it.

The C/H/S info should be on the drive label. And as Zenith indicated, if both computers are set to see it as LBA it's possible that's all you need to do. However, there were some problems with older bios' seeing some drives properly as LBA. So if that doesn't work you'll have to use C/H/S.