I have reformatted my hard drive without any problem. i am trying to load win 98. The setup program is not accepting the product key and exits by saying illegal operation and fatal error. fyi: after reformatting my hard drive computer was not detecting CDROM drive. I had to reload my CDROM(toshiba XM-5302TA) driver. could this be causing any problem ??? I really appreciate the help Thank you very much

confirm that you are using the correct Product key for that cd. brouse the cd rom for the file CD Key. confirm that that is what u are using.

I`d like to know where the "cd key" file is on the cdrom,,other than on the jewell case??

Had the same problem last spring, and I looked at several things. 1. Can you set your machine, in the bios setup, to boot from the cdrom? (I am assuming that you are booting from the win98 emergency floppy disk. Did the oak cdrom driver not work from the startup disk? Does your cdrom run as an ide drive on the secondary controller? The win98 floppy expects to find a plug and play cdrom on an ide controller. For other types, you may have to modify the autoexec.bat file on the floppy disk. 2. Did you reformat your hard drive because of a problem? Were you getting error messages relating to input/output? That problem might still exist. I don't think that the problem you are having is related to the wrong product key. If you enter the wrong key, it tells you that it is wrong and you can enter it again. When I had the problem, the fatal error occured just after the product code was entered. The cd would be read and then the fatal error would hit. In troubleshooting, I found some references to problems with a Cirrus logic video card causing such a problem. I also replaced my memory chips with known working chips thinking the fatal error was due to faulty memory. Just before I bought a new video card, I discovered that the cpu voltage was incorrect. It was set too low. Correcting the voltage solved the problem. Please try to answer some of the question to help narrow down the problem.

Hi Tim Griscom There was no problem with my hard disk. I had windows NT 4.0 workstation on it prevously. I wanted to remove NT and load win 98. Reformatting went smoothly without any error message. The error msg details show that "MSGSRV32 caused a general protection fault in windows PIDGEN.dll at 0001:0005f2c. Also I won't get this gpf msg always. If i change any one letter or digit in my product key, i get a message saying that it is invalid key and asks me to re eneter, which is better than simply being shut on my face. I am not booting fromwin 98 emergency boot disk. Meanwhile i did not find any CD key file on my win 98 CD, as Habfun suggested me to do.

dear sir, i have toshiba satellite pro 440cdt end i'm a problem.the original software windows95 but i change in windows98.i don't know the bios acces key(toshiba bios v2.80). sincerly, adi