Just purchased a new 40Gig HD. Installed successfully, FDisked and formatted fine. Trying to install Win98SE on it. When I get to the "Preparing the Install Wizard for the rest of the process, it runs til 100% complete, then just hangs there.

It's an Emachine/Pentium II Computer.

I checked the Bios for any virus detection for boot sectors and think I've disabled anything that remotely applies.

How do I get beyond this step in the Win98 installation procedure?

try this once..install it from the harddrive not from the cd.
put your win98 cd in..boot from a floppy and get to a c:\ prompt.
when your there
type
md win98
then hit enter, that will make a win98 folder on your c drive..
then type
d:\
to access your cd rom ( that is if 'd' is the label for your cd rom drive)
then type
cd win98
then you will be in the win98 folder on the cd-rom..now type
copy *.* c:\win98
that will copy all the files necessary for installation to your c:\win98 folder on the harddrive..when that is finished, type c: to get back to the c prompt, and then type
cd win98 to get back in that win98 folder on the harddrive
then type
setup
and that will begin the win98 installation from your harddrive rather than from the cd-rom...see if that fixes anything..
good luck
-Ryan

Thanks for your input, I'll try that. I'll let you know what happens.

I found the problem, turns out that I didn't look hard enough for the anti-virus option in the cmos settings. I disabled it and it installed Win98 no problem. Thanks for your help anyways.