Rookie needing some help!!! pls =)

[CrackKills]

Okay, Im trying to build a new system from scratch (Duron 650, Asus A7V, Mushkin 128MB HSDRAM, IBM Deskstar 15gbhd, Adaptec 2930u scsi card, HP 9200i CDRW, SBLive value, old STB 4400). The trouble I'm having is with installing Win98se. During boot up the system seems to recognize everything, but when I get to the win startup it loads the various drivers, then it comes up with the "preparing to start your computer" screen and gives me the following messages:

"Windows 98 has detected that drive C does not contain a valid fat or fat32 partition."
(And list several cause such as disk needs to be partitioned, 3rd party partitioning software etc.)

"The diagnostic tools were successfully loaded to C Drive."

Then

"Device driver not found : 'mscd001'.
no valid cdrom device drivers selected "

I just a little lost as where to go from here. Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Thx
B

 

[kwisatz]

Before installing win98 on the new harddisk you need to partition it. To do that, boot up as you did prior to writing this post. After all the error messages it should say C:\ on the screen. Then type "fdisk" [return]. The fdisk program will start.

During startup it will ask you if you want to enable "large disk support" [choose YES]
In fdisk choose [1] - Create primary dos partition. It will ask you if you want to use the maximum size for primary partition [Choose YES]. Then it will ask you if you want to make the primary partition (or drive C - can't remember) active [choose YES]. Then exit fdisk and reboot the computer.

At this point win98 might be able to install. If not, then read below:

When the computer writes C:\ again, type "format c:" [return]
It will ask you if you really want to format drive C [choose YES]
When the format is finished, reboot and you should be able to install windows.

Hope this helps, and that I remembered all the steps in fdisk - after switching to win2k its been a while since I've used fdisk

 

[kwisatz]

One other thing:

The error "Device driver not found: 'mscd001'" suggests that your CD-Rom drive might not be installed in dos. If that's the fact, you might not be able to install windows even though you follow the steps I described above. If so, then post it here and I will try to help you out.

BTW: Are you be any chance familiar with editing your startup files (Autoexec.bat and Config.sys)?