I installed win98 and every thing went well till it was done seting up. i have a mbr problem and windows is running in msdos real mode. and i have exclaimation next to my primary and secondary ide controllers. and i have no cd-rom. please help. i reinstalled 5 times. thanx, bill

"i have exclaimation next to my primary and secondary ide controllers". This does not sound like you are in DOS. Sounds like you are managing to boot into windows. Exclamation marks usually mean incorrect drivers. Find out what your system is (eg: chipset etc) and copy the drivers (you do have them don't you?) to somewhere handy on the harddrive. You may need a DOS boot disk with CDROM support to do this. After booting go to each problem piece of hardware in Device Manager and update the drivers. You will need to point Windows in the right direction for the drivers. Last time I had this problem was with Windows 95

He didn't say he was in DOS, he said he was in DOS compatability mode. Hillbilly, launch regedit and do a search for entries with "noide" (without the quotation marks) if you find any such entries, delete them. Reboot and see if it works.

How do you know you have an MBR problem? Are you getting an error message about MBR? Boot into safe mode...get into device manager & run down thru the list. If there are any duplicate entries, remove them. For instance, if your floppy drive is listed twice, remove BOTH entries. If any entries have an exclamation point (!), remove them...when you're finished, reboot & see if Windows sorts it all out...