Win 98 boot fail after FDISK/Format

Hello everybody.

I have recently had Windows XP running OK on my machine, but (for reasons I won't get into here) I am going back to Windows 98. I had WinXP running on NTFS and so I zero'd the hard disk, run FDISK (to set 1 partition only - FAT32) and reformatted the disk. Everything with the drive appeared to perfectly OK. The disk booted fine into DOS after the format. Free space etc all reports properly. Then after installing 98, it simply will not boot. In fact, it refused to boot into windows during the first re-boot of the installation process.

So, I re-did the whole proccess again. Same result. I have successfully installed 98 onto this disk a number of times in the past, but it just seems to hang now.

It's a 40GB Baracuda, S.M.A.R.T is reporting no problems, and I'm running it through a 80 pin cable, with cable select pin configuration on IDE1.

Everythings checks out OK, but it simplt hangs FOREVER when attempting to start windows. Autoexec seems to execute OK, it's when it gets to the 'starting windows for the first time' message that it just sits there.

PLEASE - HELP!!

Not so sure about Windows 98, but I remember that Windows 95 (yeah, I lived during that time!) couldn't handle such large capacity disks.

The previous times you have installed Windows 98 - did you have only one partition as well?

Regards,

FolkLore

 the winxp disk when loaded give you the option to revert back to a previous operating system..anyway options are download a win98 boot disk from www.bootdisk.com change the boot sequence in the bios <del or ctrl keys>boot from cdrom or completly wipe the hard drive by using this>http://www.killdisk.com/  when you upgraded to winxp it would have been a doodle re-loading win98 if fat32 was used..never mind try the killdisk progam..

Thanks for the replies!

I found out what the problem was.  Unbelieveable too.

It turns out that it was a CMOS configuration problem, and an unlikely one at that. Certainly a lesson to be learnt for anyone reading this, as I've not heard of this problem before.

In CMOS, my motherboard has an 'Intergrated Peripherals' section. Nothing unusual about that, and in this section is an option to 'Enable USB mouse support'.

When USB mouse support was enabled, Win98 refused to run during it's initial installation. If I disabled USB mouse support the problem simply went away! It made no difference whether I was running a USB mouse or not either.

Oddly enough, once Win98 is installed, I can enable USB mouse support in CMOS, both with or without a USB mouse, and it will boot just fine.

Go figure...