I agree, it sounds like you either installed the wrong memory, or too much for your motherboard. Putting the original RAM back in was a good decision. Now are you trying to do a clean install of windows 98, or are you just trying to boot it back up the way it was? A boot disk will give you the (-) because windows 98 uses dos, and that is a dos screen. Do you know your dos commands? Did you try to input any commands? It is possible you overloaded the motherboard with the RAM, especially if it was the wrong kind.