I'm trying to turn this machine into a DOS only machine, but Win98SE is getting in the way. It keeps booting in DOS mode, but freezes after it says "SBpro: I/O = 220, IRQ = 5, DMA=1". It's not technically a freeze, I guess, because the cursor is blinking, but nothing happens after that. I get no command prompt, nothing. And although I keep restarting the computer, it refuses to load Win98SE and goes straight into this. After I resolve this, though, how do I go about uninstalling Win98 and making it a DOS only machine?

Just boot of a MS-DOS Boot Floppy and:

FORMAT C: press enter

Obviously one may have to FDISK to recreate partitions depending on wether FAT16 or FAT32 is supported under the version of DOS.

The SET BLASTER statement you are using to get sound to work will only work with Sound Blaster compatable Sound cards.

You actually have DOS SubSystem under W98 and it can be left in tact by following the instructions here to boot into 'DOS'

http://www.ctyme.com/msdos7.htm

It may be locking up after it runs the soundblaster line so that may not be the problem.

What version of Dos do you plan on running? If it's 98 dos you can attempt to fix the problem (maybe by renaming autoexec.bat and config.sys so they don't run) or format and reinstall as jessejames suggests.

If you fix it or do the format and reinstall, you can edit the boootgui=1 line in msdos.sys to bootgui=0 and it should boot to dos.

I don't think you want to delete config.sys and autoexec.bat. You are going to need them to load drivers for the CD drive.

Do yourself a favor BACKUP!
Sorry, I do not check for private messages

http://www.windowsreinstall.com/install/msdos/install622/page1.htm

http://rinkworks.com/apogee/s/6.4.2.shtml

http://www.bootdisk.com/readme.htm#cdromdos