Installing Win98SE

[PortVale]

I am trying to install Win98SE on a formatted hard drive, i.e a "clean" install.
Everything runs fine until the setup wizard reaches 100%. The PC beeps and what appears to be a message windows appears, but it is completely black. I can still see the setup window progress bar, the mouse works but nothing else. If I reboot the PC or power off and restart, I do not get a safe recovery message, it's as if windows setup has never begun. On checking the contents of the C: drive, there are a few files listed, so something has happened. I have also tried Win95, with the same result. The PC is quite old: 486, 32MB RAM, 850MB HDD. All I am trying to do is replace the current HDD (171MB!!!), with a larger one. THe BIOS recognises the full size of the 850MB HDD. The PC previously ran Win95 with no problems.

Any ideas?

 

[hammerhead]

Your description describes exactly a situation I encountered.

Solved by resetting BIOS to defaults.

Never found out which setting caused the prob.

 

[Guest]

If you still have the original win95 setup disk try installing win95 first then upgrade to win98SE from within win95. You must have the win98SE upgrade version for this however, but with luck your's is this anyway.

 

[PortVale]

I tried Hammerhead's fix first. It worked!
Who knows why?

Thanks for your reply and Brian5764.

 

[hammerhead]

Nice one.

Now here's something that will really get you, my machine ran Windows fine with my custom BIOS settings, just wouldn't install it.

After installing Windows with BIOS set to defaults, I changed all the settings back to how I usually have them and Windows hasn't complained since!

I know I should have tracked down the exact fault but I was too pissed off with the machine by then. The BIOS thing was a last ditch attempt, I never thought it would actually cure the problem.