I'm hoping to eventually put together a machine that is dual booting Windows 98 and Windows XP. But I'm having trouble getting started with even Windows 98.

Here's the general Specs of the machine so far.
Motherboard: Asus A7V880. Sports 2 ATA ports, Floppy Drive Port, and two SATA Ports that are only accessible from outside the BIOS in a utility.

CPU: AMD Sempron Clocked at 1.6Ghz. Will eventually replace it with an Athalon 3000+.

RAM: Multiple Selections. 2 MICRON PC3200 400MHz Modules (1GBx2), and one Infineon 512MB Stick for Low-RAM alternative. BIOS does not appreciate all three sticks together but doesn't complain about both Micron sticks in Channel A.

GPU: ATI RAGE 128 Ultra 32MB AGP: 1 VGA Out. moderately powerful display adapter, placeholder until I can get an AGP as recent as possible that supports 98 and XP. I'm thinking a Radeon 9600-9800 Series.

Floppy: Mitsumi D359M3D. Haven't managed to boot anything from it but I'm pretty sure it's functioning correctly.

HDD: Toshiba 500GB Laptop sized SATA HDD Connected to a Mystery SATA/ATA Adapter. Combined chassis and mounting point for floppy drive bay.
Using FDISK on the OEM Boot Disc, I created a 48GB Primary Partition at the head of the drive to provide a welcoming environment for an operating system.

CD Drive: Lite-On LTR 24102M CD/RW Drive.

Earlier, with 2GB of RAM in the machine, I got about halfway through using burned CD of the traditional Win98 OEM CD, where it prompted a restart after copying the contents of the 98 CD onto the Hard Drive. It immediately complained about "Not enough Memory", so, I had come to the idea to test if the Win98 Quickinstall could allow me to bypass the RAM issue and get this build on its feet.
QuickInstall 0.9.6 MicroDirect appeared to install without issue, and detected the previously cleared out partition set up earlier. When prompted to restart and boot to the OS HDD, I just get the Flashing "_" symbol like it's trying to load something on said disc but nothing is happening at all. According to the PC Analyzer I have in a spare PCI Slot, it's attempting to boot into something, but all it does is just flash that Underscore Character like it's going to boot in a couple of seconds.

To play it safe, I've waited about three hours to make sure I would not catch it in the act of actually doing something. For the time being, I've shut the machine down and installed the 512 RAM module in the hopes that I can try again with the OEM 98 Disc with RAM potentially being less of a barrier.
Do you have any insights on why QuickInstall or the drive could be failing to boot into the prepared disc? I'd Cleared the CMOS jumper and changed the absolute minimum of BIOS Settings outside of setting up the boot order, disabling all parallel ports, the LAN port, and setting up the correct number of USB ports on the PC.

I'm going to continue tomorrow with using the OEM disc I had imaged earlier combined with the minimal 512MB of RAM, but I'd had the same conundrum of Quick Install failing to boot to anything even after I had attempted to run it using a random USB DVD Drive I had lying around, to see if that was the CD Drive's fault.

I've got somewhat less faith in that Mystery SATA adapter but it's set up as the second IDE Cable's Master and is the only thing that's connected to the ATA cable for that port on the motherboard. So far it's the only adapter I'm using. I do have some Startech SATA to ATA adapters but that would leave the drive potentially suspended in the tower chassis without reasonable support.

Any insights into this would be appreciated. Thanks!