Loading windows from the start?

[PBking82]

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-

[eversio11]

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.

[PBking82]

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

[eversio11]

I believe so.

Again, I'm just guessing.

[army71]

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 ..

[PBking82]

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-

[Quickshift]

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.

[Polygon]

Originally Posted by PBking82

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.