bmwsvsu wrote on 2023-10-25, 16:37:

-Booting a Windows 98 installation disc, after it says "Setup is checking your system configuration," it IMMEDIATELY halts with a R6003 Integer Divide by Zero error.
-Booting into DOS from Hiren's - running FDISK immediately gives a "Divide error"

What HDD is that? Size? My guess is the BIOS has a bug that prevents it from working properly with certain HDDs. This could also be a problem with MBR data - XP works because it's a newer OS that uses BIOS only for the initial OS loader, then the loader takes over and finally NT kernel. Win9x uses BIOS a lot to load stuff into memory before its kernel can run properly. Although copying a working disk image should overwrite the MBR.

Could be it's a combination of factors - BIOS limitations and some sort of issue with MBR. Is is possible to run FDISK /MBR from the floppy boot? What about zeroing the first HDD sector, does fdisk also throw an error in that case?

20 GB IDE mechanical drive is what I'm testing with since it is the closest thing to period-correct I have.

So I created a Windows 98 startup floppy disk, booted to that fine and ran FDISK. It detected the IDE drive and allowed me to partition it. Ran Format command to format it, but now upon booting into Windows 98 startup CD, it just plain locks up immediately upon choosing the option to run Windows 98 startup.

You did mark the partition as active, I assume?

Try formatting the hard drive as a system disk (/s), and copy the contents of the CD to the HDD (into say C:\98SE\) and run setup from there after booting from the HDD?

Oh this is interesting....

If you can get as far as a command prompt from a Win98 boot floppy fdisk the mbr then take the disk out of the machine put it into another PC as a slave drive partition it and then format it using the OS on that machine.
Once it has a partition and format put it back into the PC and boot the Windows 98 boot floppy and try and run fdisk. report results.

re: paradigital - Yes, active. And your suggesting was actually the very first thing I had tried as my standard way of doing things is to use Hiren's XP to partition the drive into 2 FAT32 partitions, copy the Windows 98 CD contents to the latter partition, then boot DOS from Hiren's and launch Windows 98 setup from there. The issue I ran into on this machine was that after doing all that and then booting into DOS, DOS simply couldn't see any of the partitions. But now that I've gotten a Windows 98's boot floppy disk to detect partitions, I can re-try that except use the boot floppy instead of Hiren's own DOS. I just used FDISK to create 2 partitions (1 primary, 1 extended w/1 logical drive) and am waiting for those to format (using format command). I will boot back into Hirens XP and copy over Win98 CD contents to the latter drive, then try from boot disk to launch setup that will reside on the D drive.

re: ElectroSoldier - that will be the next thing on my list if the above fails.

Interesting aside: Before reading the last 2 responses, I tried just straight-up installing Windows XP from an XP CD. Installer ran fine, copied all the setup files to the IDE drive, but on the first re-boot (where it is finally ready to boot from the hard drive for the first time), I got the following error:

1Couldn't open drive multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)
2NTLDR: Couldn't open drive multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)

Second aside: I tried copying a working image file I had of a dual install of 98/XP. Upon booting, it simply says NTLDR is missing.

Well this is interesting....SUCCESS maybe?

1 - Boot to DOS floppy disk
2 - FDISK (create a primary partition of 17GB and an extended partition with a 1.5GB logical drive)
3 - FDISK /MBR
4 - FORMAT C-drive and D-drive (default settings)
5 - Boot into Hiren's XP. Copy Windows 98 CD contents to D-drive
6 - Boot to DOS floppy disk
7 - CD to D directory then run SETUP
8 - Setup works, copied files, then after reboot it BOOTED INTO HARD DRIVE (now finishing installation)

We'll see how this finishes up. Also will be curious if an image file I create using Ghost of this will work or not.

Bizarre to say the least that this works when nothing else would (and by nothing else, I'm talking methods that work fine all the way down to old Pentium II hardware).

Ok, so a Norton Ghost imaged drive will NOT work. What is Ghost doing that breaks this? Plugged the drive I used to create the image back in and it works fine. I've never, ever encountered this problem with the numerous different pieces of Windows 98 hardware I've set up through the years.

Are you sure your Hard Drive is healthy ?
Can you post a SMART LOG.

bmwsvsu wrote on 2023-10-25, 20:26:

Ok, so a Norton Ghost imaged drive will NOT work. What is Ghost doing that breaks this? Plugged the drive I used to create the image back in and it works fine. I've never, ever encountered this problem with the numerous different pieces of Windows 98 hardware I've set up through the years.

I couldnt say, I never had much luck with Norton Ghost.
I tried it several times over the years and it never really worked as it should for me.

What I eventually figured out is that this motherboard does not play nicely with any kind of solid state drive. Hyperdisk 32GB disk-on-module (40-pin IDE), 2 different branded 32GB CF card (industrial) over 2 different adapters, all of this caused nothing but problems and I never succeeded at getting them properly formatted, let alone Windows installed on them.

So on to a traditional mechanical IDE hard drive, these are fussy too, still never managed to get Windows 98 startup CD to work when one is installed.

What finally worked using an 80GB drive was:
-FDISK and FORMAT IDE drive from DOS boot disk (but even here would only allow up to 16GB of total storage)
-Copy Windows 98 CD over to 2nd partition, then from a DOS prompt launch the setup, allow first phase to finish before first reboot
-remove disk, connect externally to another computer, use AOEMI partition manager to expand partitions out to 72GB and 3GB

I found a really old version of Ghost (7.5 I think) that fit onto a floppy disk and was able to successfully clone my expanded partitions to an identical 80GB hard drive, and that drive booted fine as well.