Loading windows from the start?

My power supply blew in my computer a while ago and that in turn cooked the hard drive. So i went out and got a new power supply and hard drive. Installed them both and setup the hard drive. Now my problem is that When I put in the windows startup disk(using win98) it asks me if i want to use CD-ROM support I select yes(so I can install my copy of Win98 that is on cd). After selecting that, it just runs through a bunch of crap, and then goes to A: . I've done this before several times but that was years ago and I have no clue where to start. I'm assuming my CD-ROM has no driver so the computer isn't recognizing it. Is this the case? I'm terrible at DOS so thats part of my problem. I basically need help installing windows, i guess that is all. Thanks. Peace-

I'm not sure, but this may be a jumping point, you may need a boot disk. It's a floppy disk that has just enough information on it to run the install CD. You can download them from various websites, just search for windows 98 boot disk.

Is this boot disk you're talking about, different than a "Windows startup disk" that you create on any windows machine? Thanks. Peace-

I believe so.

Again, I'm just guessing.

you can find a boot disk at www.bootdisk.com just download the right one and double click on it , it will then ask for a disk in drive A:
then it will do the appropriate install on the floppy

also a question, why not use Windows XP ?

Ive got an original one .... let me knoow if I can help ..

Yea i got a boot disk both from a win98 machine and one off of boot disk.com. I still have the same problem as before. I'm using win98 because i have a copy of it so i can then upgrade to xp(i have the upgrade also.) The last time i did this(when i origanlly built the machine) i had no problems whatsoever. Just inserted the boot disk then it started to load 98 off the cdrom. Peace-

Hate to tell you this but your CD-Rom drive is probably also fried. Go to the CMOS and see if it finds the CD-Rom drive. Consider yourself lucky when my powersupply friend it friend my MB HDD CD and almost brand new CD-RW.

Yea i got a boot disk both from a win98 machine and one off of boot disk.com. I still have the same problem as before. I'm using win98 because i have a copy of it so i can then upgrade to xp(i have the upgrade also.) The last time i did this(when i origanlly built the machine) i had no problems whatsoever. Just inserted the boot disk then it started to load 98 off the cdrom. Peace-

So, does it try to load mscdex, if so what happens? If it trys to load mscdex then it should either load or it will say that no CD-ROM could be detected and the boot disk will continue to load. If it says that it can't detect your CD-ROM then I would make sure it is connected correctly. If it is then I would say that the PSU might have taken the CD-ROM with it as well. No worries though, you can get DVD-ROM drives for next to nothing these days.