Did you answer "yes" to the "large drive support" question when you partitioned the drive?
Also running setup with the /is parameter will skip scandisk, but this NOT the right direction to take

Make your last partition one cluster smaller. (Make tiny space in the end of hard drive). Some hard drives have that common problem. It is not critical.

konc wrote:

Did you answer "yes" to the "large drive support" question when you partitioned the drive?
Also running setup with the /is parameter will skip scandisk, but this NOT the right direction to take

I did answer yes to large drive support.

EDIT: Excuse me, I did answer yes in the past but it is no longer asking me about it

Cyberdyne wrote:

Make your last partition one cluster smaller. (Make tiny space in the end of hard drive). Some hard drives have that common problem. It is not critical.

I did leave some scraps of unallocated space on the end. Can't remember exactly how much but it was definitely more than a cluster. More like a few mb

What software are you using to partition the drive?
I find fdisk is best. yes it's not very smart but either is windows so at least you know windows will understand the disk layout.

With disks larger then 64GB you need either fdisk included with WinME or the updated Win98 version(which is getting hard to find!)
https://silentdragon.com/download/FDisk/

You can either install 263044usa8.exe to an existing windows install or simply extract the correct version to your bootdisk and rename.
fdisk.98g - rename to FDISK.EXE for Win98 1st Edition
fdisk.98s - rename to FDISK.EXE for Win98SE

Also I always keep my primary partition less then 4GB, usually 2GB is fine for OS and any programs excluding games

more like scamdisk

I get this error only when I don't use FDISK to make the partitions.

Disks sometimes have media defects. I wouldn't worry terribly much.

Other users are giving other possible answers, but with old hard disks I always just expect a few bad clusters, honestly. Even the best, new in-box disks have media defects from the factory.

Try this as a workaround:
Use fdisk and make a single partition of no more than 128GiB.
Use this to install Win98SE onto.
Install all drivers, updates and such.
Now use fdisk to create the rest of the partitions.
I hope this helps. 😀

Lets start with more information.
what motherboard/cpu is this?
How big is the HDD?

Cobra42898 wrote:

Lets start with more information.
what motherboard/cpu is this?
How big is the HDD?

I haven't been able to try any of the other suggestions yet but the mobo is an MSI 865PE Neo 2 and HDD is a 250GB split into in 3 partitions (111GB max) running on SATA.

I don't remember if I've seen this exact error, but I've had some weird and frustrating glitches like this with Scandisk on 1 or 2 occasions when a drive had old data on it. The solution I've used in that situation was to zero fill it, then Scandisk didn't complain anymore. Of course then it has to be partitioned again. The old data shouldn't matter, but Scandisk is dumb. Apparently it complains when there's data that it doesn't understand, perhaps from newer OSes.

If you're worried about the condition of the disk, I'd use some more reliable utility like HDAT2.

Could be a bad SATA cable.

I'm not sure if this of any relevance, but MS-DOS had a bug in respect to maximum heads.
Anyway, I think I should mention it, since ridiculously sized HDDs (huge storage capacity) are more the norm than the exception nowadays..

"The CHS addressing supported in IBM-PC compatible BIOSes code used eight bits for - theoretically up to 256 heads counted as head 0 up to 255 (FFh).
However, a bug in all versions of Microsoft DOS/IBM PC DOS up to and including 7.10 will cause these operating systems to crash on boot when
encountering volumes with 256 heads[2]. Therefore, all compatible BIOSes will use mappings with up to 255 heads (00h..FEh) only, including in virtual 255×63 geometries.

This historical oddity can affect the maximum disk size in old BIOS INT 13h code as well as old PC DOS or similar operating systems:

(512 bytes/sector)×(63 sectors/track)×(255 heads (tracks/cylinder))×(1024 cylinders)=8032.5 MB, but actually 512×63×256×1024=8064 MB
yields what is known as 8 GB limit.[7] In this context relevant definition of 8 GB = 8192 MB is another incorrect limit,
because it would require CHS 512×64×256 with 64 sectors per track. "

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cylinder-head-sector#Heads

Also, using old versions of GParted might be helpful here, since they can assist in resizing existing FAT partitions. 😀
Success report: How to resize a partition on Windows 98

Ok, seems to be solved. What I did was boot with the Windows XP install cd and set up my partitions there. Then restarted booting from the 98 cd and let the installer do it's thing with scandisk and formatting of each of the partitions. No errors found this time. So it seems old OS's just dont't like the way modern software formats drives. At least not with the hardware/software combo I've used this time.

EDIT: Still not quite solved maybe? Windows can't seem to find anything to boot from after the first restart during the install. May or may not be related. Still troubleshooting for now.

What are specs of the system it is going on tails?

CPU: Intel Pentium 4 2.4B
Motherboard: MSI 865PE Neo 2
RAM: 2x256MB Corsair VS256MB400
GPU: Gigabyte GeForce FX5500 GV-N55256D REV:1.0
Soundcard: Creative Audigy 2 ZS
Storage: Hitachi 250GB Deskstar
PSU: CoolerMaster RS430-PCAR
Case: Antec SLK1650

I've put up a build thread here: Tails Pentium 4 Windows 98

This problem almost drove me nuts. I formatted the drive then copied a whole bunch of games, drivers and apps over to my drive from my modern PC. When I booted the PC and tried to install Win98 off the drive it gave me this error.

Here's how I solved it. Boot up Gparted Live, right click the drive, choose "Manage Flags" and make sure the LBA and BOOT flags are set. In my case the LBA flag wasn't set so DOS was reading in CHS mode. While you're there you can check the disk for errors, just right click the drive again and choose "Check". After you're done, shutdown and run scandisk under DOS/98 again.

tails wrote on 2019-10-17, 23:35:

I haven't been able to try any of the other suggestions yet but the mobo is an MSI 865PE Neo 2 and HDD is a 250GB split into in 3 partitions (111GB max) running on SATA.

Just for the record, since no one mentioned it so far: you can not use Win9x on hard disks larger than 128 GB! It doesn't matter if you make the partition smaller or not, it just won't work. Overflows will happen when Win9x addresses the sectors, randomly corrupting data. Get a smaller HDD if you want to install Win98.