The Pentium III 500 build with the EPoX EP-61BXA-M has an incredibly frustrating and irritating "quirk": It will read and install Windows 98 FE from the original CD just fine, yet it will fail to do so with a known working Windows 98 SE CD. It sometimes boots from this CD, it sometimes doesn't; sometimes it can read from it, while other times, it just acts like the CD is bad, and you can hear the drive trying to read it, but it can't. Every other computer I own will read this CD. What?

I've painfully installed Windows 98 SE on this system before, and it's not fun. When trying to install Windows 98 SE from the hard drive (copying the win98 folder to the C: drive), it will always hard lock at "Programs on the Start Menu." So you can barely install it from the CD, and can't from the HDD at all. With Windows 98 FE, it's flawless.

This has agitated me for weeks, but I've finally gotten to the point to where I can't deal with it anymore, and searching up the problem seems to yield no results.

This transcends CD/DVD drives. It's like the motherboard itself just retches at the thought of using SE. I genuinely don't understand this. It acts the same exact way with burned 98 SE CDs.

Specs:

EPoX EP-61BXA-M Motherboard
Intel Pentium III Katmai SL35E 500MHz
128MB PC-133 RAM
Creative Labs 3D Blaster CT5823 (nVidia RIVA TNT2 32MB)
Creative Labs Sound Blaster Live! Value
Toshiba DVD-ROM
Seagate Barracuda ATA-IV 20GB
1.44MB 3.5" FDD

I should note that once 98SE is actually installed, it works great. No hitches, nothing. It's just installing it that is the issue.