Recently my Compaq laptop was acting very slow and crashing so I decided I would reinstall winXP. The problem is that the XP I have is an upgrade, so in order to install it I needed to install an old copy of win98 second edition I have. After reformating I installed 98 but some problems occured. 1. When 98 is done copying files to the hard drive the computer needs to restart. This works fine. However, after it restarts and does some hardware detecting it needs to shut down again. On this shutdown the system hangs at th "Windows is shutting down" screen. 2. After manually powering off and on, scandisk runs and then installation continues. Then when I am promted to set the date/time info, as soon as I click on anything I get the blue screen of death. Afterwards installation continues. 3. After a little more automatic installation I get another blue screen of death. After this installation continues and the system needs to be restarted again. The computer again hangs up on this shut down. 4. After manually powering off and on it says that "the file dhcpcsvc.dll on windows 98 second edition cd-rom cannot be found." below that is says that setup could not find the file in the specified path "c:\\windows\system\precopy". when i try to specify the cd drive as the place to look for the file i cannot because all that is available inthe pull down menu is "c:\\windows\system\precopy" and a:\. 5. To get past this I have to click "skip file." Then another file cannot be found and so I have to skip that file. Ultimately I end up skipping many .dll .exe etc... files. After Im finished skipping a million files the computer restarts. 6. Upon reboot i get a screen that says "cannot find a device file that may be needed to run windows or a windows application","the windows registry or system.ini file refers to this device file, but the device file no longer exists" it says some other stuff about if I deleted the file on purpose etc... At the bottom is says vnetbios.vxd and syas press any key to continue. Then the same thing happens except it is a different file name. Then i get the windows 98 password login screen. 7. Windows starts up and seems to be functional. The problem I have, however, is when i got into my computer there is no d drive there. Because of this I cannot install XP on the computer. I just need to how to setup xp from a cd if there is no cd drive in "my computer." I dont know if it is a driver problem or just a problem caused by the screwed up 98 installation. Any help would be greatly appreciated. thank you all.

At this early stage after reformatting I wouldn't accept such a rickety W98SE install. Maybe you can make a folder and copy your W98SE CD into it then install from your HD. Sometimes this works better. Derek.W

Most likely you are looking at a hardware failure on your machine. If you want to try copying the CD to your drive, here is a tutorial, http://www.duxcw.com/digest/Howto/software/windows/upgrade/inst98.htm If something is failing, no. one on the list is your harddrive.

Upgrade CDs don't actually need to have a previous version of Windows installed.....they just require proof of ownership. If you install XP onto a clean, formatted harddrive, you'll be prompted to provide proof of ownership. Just swap the XP CD with the Win98 CD & point Setup to the CD. It'll look for a couple of files to verify, then you can continue with setup. I would format the HD again, then boot with the XP CD & install clean. HTH Dave

Dave357 has the answer.

First I tried copying the win98se cd to my hard drive and then installing it from there. It worked a little bit but I still got the blue screen and no cd drive showed up. I vreformatted and tried to install xp from the beginning but when i try to run setup.exe it says that this program cannot be run in dos mode. How do I install XP to a newly formatted hard drive if setup cannot be run in DOS? Thanks again.

"How do I install XP to a newly formatted hard drive if setup cannot be run in DOS?" - chewie1305 I had to install XP onto a new hard drive about a year ago. It was a huge pain in the ass to install XP right away. It works much better if you install a previous version first. I used Windows 2000 which made it way easier but I think Windows 98 should work too (unless there is something majorly wrong with your machine or the Windows 98 CD). Putting a Windows 98 bootdisk in the floppy drive before you turn on your computer and selecting "with CD ROM support" should help you gain access to your CD ROM drive. I've had this same problem every time I tried to format and re-install windows and that bootdisk usually ends up being the answer.