Help reinstalling win 98 on an old computer

[superdave]

I may end up ditching it, it's the kids' computer, it was operating very erratically, but I decided to give it the ol' college try. First, I reformatted the hard drive, which hadn't been done since I got this HD, which was probably 6 years ago. (I got a new HD because the old one wouldn't run Championship Manager, and the first edition I bought was 00-01.)

Anyway, all I have laying around are some 3.1 floppies, some 95 floppies, and a 98 upgrade CD. So I install 3.1, I *think* everything went fine. Then I put in the upgrade CD. It started the process, but about 2 minutes in, it says that it can't do it. It says that if I'm running NTFS or ?HPFS?, I need to create a boot partition.

How do I do that? I have a 98 SE startup floppy. I also have a Win 98 Starts Here CD.

TIA.

[spejic]

Did you format the disk while in Windows XP or 2000? Windows 98 requires the hard disk to be in the old 16-bit DOS format (that is, FAT format) instead of the newer Windows NT-type formats. You need to reformat the whole disk using FAT. Boot to a DOS prompt and reformat the disk with:

format c: /s

[superdave]

No, I booted directly to MS-DOS, and formatted the hard drive from there.

[spejic]

Do you know which version of DOS? Was it from a disk made on Windows XP?