No partitions = a failed installation. At the very least, you must have one partition per drive. A hard drive <i>must</i> be partitioned before it will accept a file system.
Did you see the FDISK simulation link I posted above? That contains pictures of the screens.
If you want the easiest method with two hard drives, with one partition per disk:
Boot up the system with a startup disk.
At the A Prompt (A:\>) type FDISK.
FDISK will automatically choose the first drive on the cable that is jumpered as the Master.
Choose to create a DOS partition.
Choose a Primary DOS partition.
With only one partition on the drive, choose to use the maximum space on the drive.
Reboot.
Again, type FDISK at the prompt. Choose to make the partition active from the menu.
Reboot again. Use FDISK. Change the current disk drive to the second hard drive. Go through the procedure again, but do <i>not</i> make the partition on the second hard drive active.
When finished, take out the floppy startup disk. Change the boot order in your BIOS to CD-ROM first. Boot with the operating system CD. Install Win98SE in the first, active partition on the first hard drive. The CD will will allow you to format the partition during the installation. Any partitions larger than 2GB will automatically be formatted as FAT32. I don't recommend using FAT or FAT16, even if the partition is smaller than 2GB. In this situation, with one partition per drive, and the drive's being 40GB each, that shouldn't matter.
After Win98SE is installed, go to each hard drive letter in My Computer <i>except</i> C: (and anything associated with the CD-ROM.) Right-click, choose Format, and select FAT32 as the file system.
At this point, both hard drives should be partitioned, formatted, and Win98SE installed in C:
As for WinXP ... place the operating system CD in the CD-ROM. From the Start/Run, type setup.exe. Choose to install the OS, but <i>not</i> as an upgrade, and be sure to accept the advanced option to select the partition for the installation. Install the OS on the first partition on the <i>second</i> hard drive. If you wish to use FAT32, keep the file system intact ... otherwise, choose NTFS. You should be aware, though, that any NTFS partitions will not be visible from within WinME.
After the OS is installed, a 30-second bootloader will appear after the POST, allowing you to select the OS you wish to use.
After you are finished, I suggest changing the boot order in the BIOS back to floppy, first.
Please read the information in the links already posted carefully, and you should feel more confident about the procedure. If you follow the steps, there shouldn't be any problems. It's not difficult.
Important Note: I still suggest using at at least two partitions per hard drive, especially with any partitions 32GB or more in size using FAT32. Otherwise, you'll have too much slack space, and the large cluster sizes will be inefficient. You can easily see how to create extended/logical partitions in the FDISK Simulator. Use a percentage (%) when selecting the size of the partition for the fastest results. In your case, two 20GB partitions (50%) per disk would be a good idea.
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Toejam31
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