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Hey everyone, I am having a strange problem with trying to install Windows XP on my MSI KT880 Delta, Athlon XP system. When I try booting from cd, the drive twitches a bit for half a minute maybe, but the boot from cd message never comes up, then it proceeds to boot from the hdd (which currently has Win98 on it, that had installed without any issues btw). Both the hdd and the optical drive are ide, both are masters and sit on two separate cables, I also tried swapping the cables (optical drive on ide port 1 or 2) and tried it as master or cable select. The optical drive model is Toshiba Samsung SH-S182, I also tried it with a Liteon SOHR-5238S without any luck. I know that both the optical drive and the cd are ok, since I've installed windows xp using both onto a ECS K8M800-M2, Athlon 64 pc just a couple of days ago. What could be cause of this behaviour (almost certain it's the motherboard)?

It's the gpu, having radeon 9600xt in the system prevents the cdrom driver from loading. Ram makes no difference. Tried it with 2 different PSUs. One of the weirdest pc problems that I've ever run into. - Just to update this case. Later I've noticed rather low scores on a routine run of 3dmark 2001 in Windows XP on this machine (without any visual artifacts however). On checking system processes with System Internals Process Explorer, we can see high System Interrupts cpu usage, indicating some sort of a hardware problem. Strange issue indeed, bought this card with a bunch of others sold as "problematic" but had no trouble with it until this day.

This is a relatively new system, assembled somewhere around august 2019 at the earliest. I've been messing quite a bit with trying few different gpus and cpus and it was good all the way until trying to reinstall windows 98 early this month. I am also always very mindful of the motherboard flex when connecting stuff and shove my fingers between mobo and the case to prevent it, so again I find it very unlikely to have been a case of improperly connected ide cables. Also, during my initial troubleshooting I've tried both primary and secondary ides and these are oriented differently on this motherboard. As for memory, I've gone through 3 different kits: 2x256 (tried 1 and 2 modules), 2x512 (as 1 module) and finally a different 256mb module a couple days later after removing the mobo. My primary dual channel kits were rock stable through hours of gaming sessions and to think that they would repeatedly fail (at least 10 times in a row) a dos driver load is ridiculous. So I guess the only worthy troubleshooting takeaway from this all is to reseat all the stuff.

The issue appears to have strangely resolved itself. I have already put together another pc, but still decided to give that asus mobo its last chance at redemption (and to try the above recommended floppy image grub4dos boot). I've only used one stick of 256mb (and a previously unused stick if this bit of info could ever be of any importance to anyone going through similar trouble) this time and replaced the gpu from a radeon 9600xt to a 9200, I've also used only 1 sata hdd and 1 sata cdrom (the same ones as in my previous attempts). Surprisingly it gets past the cdrom driver loading bit in a brief and I don't know what did the trick. Essentially the storage config has remained unchanged, since I've been disconnecting the cables from the device-ends of the other storage components in all my previous attempts, there is some chance however that maybe disconnecting them from the mobo did the trick (since I've quickly had to put the thing back together on a piece of cardboard).

Yeh, queer conflicts, sure sounds too complex for me to figure it all out. I tried it with easy2boot, which I think is grub4dos based, but it reports the resulting exe (the one from my cd it must be) as unbootable (maybe not "unbootable", but it doesn't like something about it) with error 13.

I don't have any floppies and yes, it's a major pita. Something screwed my mobo bad, surprised xp boots and runs fine. I will just put together a new win98 box. And thanks for the detailed instructions with the new boot cd, may try it some other day.

I reflashed the bios in an effort to fix the issue. How could I force it load the gcdrom.sys?

Right, but I've reset cmos several times and flashed the bios since removing it. I could wait for 20 minutes and nothing would happen with that cdrom driver screen, whereas normally it takes like 3 seconds.

I've tried it with another cable and also a sata drive with a sata-to-ide adapter, so 3 different drives now. Also, all of them show up and work in WinXP (another sata drive) on the same pc, not to mention the original one was working without any issues so recently. + I've tried it with 3 different ide cables now, one brand new asus sealed, just opened the baggy now, still no luck. + Just tried both the hdd and one of the "suspected culprit" cdroms in another 865g socket 478 mobo, and everything boots and installs fine. Go figure. Still would love to hear any ideas as to what could be happening with that p5pe-vm board, since now it seems like that's where the problem is. And just to get some things out of the way, with the p5pe, I've tried resetting the cmos several times, starting the pc without the cmos battery, tried few of the various dma modes in the cdrom bios settings (with the pio mode set to 0 the system would properly freeze trying to load the cdrom driver), finally reflashed the bios again to 1501 (the last version, same as I had before though). Tried 2 different ram kits, with both 1 and 2 sticks (512 and 256mb). I can't believe it could be related to the board currently running a c2d (and I know it can't, it was fine a few weeks ago), because that is the only thing that I haven't tried swapping out for something else.

The disc is in very good condition (has literally seen no use between 2000 and 2019) and it was working fine as recently as November maybe. I have also now tried it with a burned oem image and it's the same thing. As for the drive, yes - it spins up, it takes me to the windows 98 cdrom startup menu and then just does nothing.

Hey everyone, I have this really strange problem with my win98 pc. When I boot from cdrom and try to either "start win98 setup" or "start computer with cdrom support" the disc spins up, a message appears saying it's trying to load some "oak technologies" driver for oemcd001 device and then it just stays there, the system does not freeze, I can ctrl-alt-del to restart and the cursor at the end of the message keeps blinking, but it doesn't load the driver. I used to be able to install windows 98 on this pc just fine, this is not the first time that I'm doing this with this very machine and my win98se cd, an original disc that came with an oem pc back in 2000. The pc configuration is as follows: asus p5pe-vm mobo, c2d 6420, ide cdrom, sata 80gb hdd. I've also tried it with 2 different ide cdroms now, configured as both master and cable select. The storage ports are set to run in "compatibility mode", if I set them to run in "enhanced mode", the system attempts to load the driver and fails (expected behaviour), so I know the drives are functional. The only change to this machine that I can think of, since my last windows 98 reinstall about 2 months ago, was the removal of a slave sata-to-ide adaptered 80gb sata hdd on the same ribbon cable as the cdrom, BUT I cannot see how it can make any difference since I've always disconnected everything but the cd-rom and my system hdd for windows reinstalls. Any ideas on what's going on are very welcome.