I have another computer. I put a brand new 80 gig hard drive in it. I put Windows 98SE on it. Worked fine. Then I got a copy of Windows XP Pro upgrade. It loaded up Ok and I used it for about three months with no problems.

Now I decided to keep this extra computer offline. I wanted to reinstall Windows 98SE. I put the Win98Se disk in the CD drive and it started the process. It said that I had to format the drive. No problem, I formatted it. Then when it started to load the OS, it stopped at the same point again and said that I had to reformat it. I redid this situation three times, with the same problem.

1) I want Windows 98SE on it.

2) Is there another way to reformat the drive?

Edited July 15, 200620 yr by Martin L

Don't you hate it, when you keep trying and then all of a sudden it starts to work and you don't know why because you did the same thing over and over again, but then you don't care because it is working.

if you formatted in ntfs when installed xp, then you will have to boot off the xp setup cd and format in fat32, then reboot, insert your win98 setup cd and let it do its thing.

In the 98 menu when you boot from CD w/CDROM support, choose that. Type fdisk, enter, partition the drive how you want it.

Reboot, and boot w/CDROM support again til you get to the dos prompt. Type "format C:" (Win98 always lists the boot drive as C: anyway) and you have a fresh FAT(32) partition.

I did the format using the Windows 98SE disk. After it satrted to load the setup files. Then after a few minutes it stopped and these warnings came up.

#1 SUWIN caused Segment Load Failure in module SETUPX.DLL at 0012:1542

#2 W98SETUP caused Segment Laod Failure in module WGA.DRV at 0001:2863

#3 W98SETUP caused a General Protection Fault in module USER.EXE at 0001:40B6

THen it stops loading.

Don't know what they mean

This is more than likely a hardware fault. You can boot from BartPe with "Everest Ultimate Edition" system monitor on it. Open this application & monitor the voltages. especially the 5 volt. Also monitor the cpu temperature.

I have also seen situations where the 5v supply on the motherboard was ok but that supplied to the 2 different ide cahnnels was fluctuating wildly. If you see fluctuations greater than say 0.15 v or the voltage is below 4.75 v you should go out and buy a substantially higher capacity power supply. It might be a good idea to connect an accurate VOM to the hdd power connector & monitor it under different load conditions.

Another thing to lookout for is the size shown in your bios. Although the bios may not support 80 gb winxp will support it & give you access beyond 32 gb. However if you reformat it under win98 you will run into all kinds of problems.

Instead of reformatting, wipe the entire drive w/fdisk or a similar utility like Ghost's gdisk. While it's possible to upgrade, downgrading is always problematic.

After using fdisk and then fromating the hard drive, finally I was able to load Windows 98SE. It seems to be workin great now. Very strange, but it works so I'll leave it alone.

Thanks for all the help

Run MemTest86+ on it for a few hours. I think you have a RAM problem, which will continue to show up at a later date.

Thank you. I'll download it and run it.