Recycle your Computers & Technology with us.

Why can't I reinstall Win98 on my new hard drive?

Posted By : Student of Katharine Gibbs School - New York on March 30, 2004

Follow us on Facebook   Follow us on Twitter   Follow us on LinkedIn

Let Data Doctors be your personal IT department today

The hard drive on this machine failed. I installed a new hard drive partitioned and formatted it using partition magic and used the OEM CD to try and reinstall Win98 2nd edition.

The machine was started using a startup disk which loaded the basic system files required including the CD ROM driver. At the DOS prompt which follows the loading of these files I chose the ROM drive and typed in setup. The CD started and the resulting screen asked "Choose 1 to setup Win 98 using CD Rom". 1 is chosen and entered but the CD did not proceed to load the program.

In the course of my own diagnosis I have used the same HD and OEM disk on another machine and loaded the program successfully.

The machine is using Award Modular BIOS v6.OOPG

I have also tried loading WinXP, booting from CD ROM. It starts loading the basic files and when the screen appears "starting windows" the program stops loading.

Any help you can give to solve this problem will be much appreciated. Thank you.

This question was answered on March 30, 2004. Much of the information contained herein may have changed since posting.


This could be because you might have gotten a hard drive with less space.

Check to see how much space is on the new hard drive (i.e 40 or 60 GB) in comparison to the old hard drive

You will be able to see how much space is on the hard drive on the top of the hard drive case itself.

If the new drive has less space then you need to get a drive with comparable space to the old drive.

About the author

Posted by Student of Katharine Gibbs School - New York on March 30, 2004

Need Help with this Issue?

We help people with technology! It's what we do.
Contact or Schedule an Appointment with a location for help!