problems installing Win98

[RichOne]

am trying to install win98 to a laptop that has had a replacement hard drive installed, boots up ok from startup floppy, copies files to hard drive from win98 cdrom but when it restarts comes up with 'Disk I/O Error' what does this mean ? thank you

[GX1_Man]

Most likely a bad hard disk, but could be a failed IDE controller, which is worse. You might try to download a diagnostic from the appropriate manufacturer's web site. This is usually very bad news in a laptop, and is not related to Windows at all. Is there vital data on that drive?

http://www.computerhope.com/cgi-bin/yabb/YaBB.cgi?num=1122425778

[RichOne]

Thank you GX1_Man for your comments - there is no vital data on the laptop,
i can start afresh, the original hard disk was damaged and a replacement obtained from ebay, this has been checked in situ with Scandisk and seemed ok, i cant access the net (via this machine) to download any drivers etc.
Although i changed the hard disk myself i am obviously not a techie and if this is a major hardware problem then perhaps i have a 'junker' !

[GX1_Man]

Let us know how it goes!  

[Backdated]

Before giving up, boot via the floppy as if you were installing Windows as normal, fdisk the hard drive. If you saw nothing untoward during the fdisk process like unrecognised partitions etc format the drive and make a folder called install or similar. Using the Xcopy command, copy the contents of the Win98 CD to that folder (You only really nedd the cab files etc from the Win98 folder of the CD but if you've got the space......)

Was the filecopy successful? If so, try running setup from the hard drive rather than the CD.