just bought a new Shuttle AK32 mobo (950AMD T'Bird) and 256MB DDR Ram (Kingston) to upgrade my computer. I reformatted my HDD (Maxtor, 15GB, ATA66) using fdisk and format c:/s After doing so fdisk shows a single primary, active, FAT32 DOS partition with 15GB of space (I didn't even try to partition the HDD to keep it simple) I downloaded a Win98 bootdisk with CD-Rom support from bootdisk.com Then i do the following procedure: 1. Boot system from floppy 2. create win98 dir on c-drive 3. copy win98 dir from win98 setup CD to this directory using copy e:win98 c:win98 4. run setup.exe from c-drive When windows setup runs its system check the misery begins: There's all kinds of errors: Errors in .cab files, sometimes the system just freezes and doesn't do anything, windows can't decompress .cab files...and so on and so on I suspected a failure of the HDD and run scandisk with surface scan on another system and there were no errors detected. What can be the problem? I also tried to run setup directly from the CD-Rom but similar things happen. Thanks for helping me Alex

It's been my experience that when you get errors about compression it's because the main partition isn't set to "active". But, sense yours *is* ::: I would try starting all over by fdisking again and formatting (with or w/o /s) and then set the cmos to boot to the cdrom and install that way. tom

Might also be a dirty or scratched CD, (or tempremental CD drive)as you're getting the same errors both from the CD and the copied files. Can you get ahold of another win98 CD? or, as you mentioned you had another pc available to test the Hard drive, if it's win 98 maybe you can copy the win98 directory from that PC onto a CD, or directly to your newly reformatted Hard drive?

RE: Response #1--- Not all Win98 SE CDs are bootable. ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ You listed: 1. Boot system from floppy 2. create win98 dir on c-drive 3. copy win98 dir from win98 setup CD to this directory using copy e:win98 c:win98 4. run setup.exe from c-drive Delete or format to clean out junk. Do 1. Skip 2. & 3. Run Setup from CD

just had similar problems running setup. Numerous repeated fdisks and formats. Turned out it was a memory problem, and changing the bios settings for 'timing setting mode' to safe. This allowed me to run setup with minimum problems.(now using computer to write this after 3 days of trying to install) Still had problems with 'clean the Cd..consult setup.txt on CAB files' etc, but rebooted and it pulled through. This could be the same for urs! try setting the memory settings in bios to safe.

thanks for all the help. Unfortunately the problem is still there: i used a DDR 266 memory module and after this a SDRAM 100 module: With the DDR i get the following error straight away when setup runs scandisk: run time error M6111:Math - floating point error: stack underflow With the SDRAM the error happens later on and is an: Application Error - SUWIN caused segment load failure in module krnl386.exe Is this caused by the memory i'm using?