I am trying to istall Win98SE to a formatted C drive. When I type setup I receive this message: CDR101: not ready reading drive 1. abort,retry,fail? I have read that a dirty CDROM is the usual culpret. I have carefully cleaned the CDROM but get the same result. Can someone suggest a workaroud for this problem? I would be much obliged.

It's usually the cdrom or cd disk. The drivers are loading so there's not really a work around. Could the cable be loose? Do you have more than one cdrom device connected? If so, try the other one. Also try hitting R (for retry) a few times to give the cdrom time to spin up.

Thank you DAVEINCAPS for your suggestions regarding my CDR101 problem. I have disconnected/reconnected my CDROM cables and tried repeatedly hitting the R key withput success. I have 2 cdrom devices and tried installing from both. In desperation I thought I'd start from scratch to insure a good troublefree installations. I have fdisked/formatted/partitioned the HD. When I started setup I get the following message: No OS found Insert OS setup disk- then press any key Boot from ATAPI CDROM no emulation Press any key to boot from CD -this keeps repeating- I've wandered aimlessly around the HD and came across terms like, this disk cannot be started from DOS etc. Any suggestions will be welcome.

You need to set the a: drive as the first boot device in cmos/bios setup and then boot with the floppy bootdisk. Apparently the cdrom and hard drive are the first two as they're now set. There's no system files on the hard drive so it won't boot and the problem with your cdrom is keeping it from booting. I don't know why neither of your cdroms is working, unless it is the disk. But you might try leaving just one hooked up and see if it works. If it's on the same cable as the hard drive its jumper should be set to 'slave'. If it's on a separate cable set the jumper to 'master'. If the first drive doesn't work, connect just the other one. Once you boot with the bootdisk and choose 'cdrom support' try putting another cd in the drive and see if it'll read it. Some bootdisks temporarily change the drive letter of the cdrom. The last few lines that load prior to the final a:\> prompt will tell you the drive letter. Make sure you use a data (not audio) cd. Put it in and then at the a:\> prompt type dir X: and enter, where x: is the cdrom drive letter indicated when you booted up. If you get a directory listing instead of the error message then the cdrom is OK and the problem must be with the 98 cd.