First post, by IcarusAvery
So, I've got an issue. I posted here a day or two ago about turning an old Dell Dimension 4600 into a Win98 machine, and already I'm running into issues.
I downloaded an OEM disk image and burned that to CD so I had a bootdisk (I would've used a floppy for a bootdisk and ran a retail CD, but I have no blank floppies, and until I get this computer set up I don't have any way to write to floppies.) I formatted the disk, ran the install, and got to where it *should've* booted. Instead, it gets to "Completed updating files, continuing to load Windows" and just freezes, with a little blinking dash in the upper left. It'll eventually restart on its own, and when it does, it'll either hang on the Win98 splash screen, or change back to whatever menu it was in before (usually the "boot from hard disk or CD" menu) with the little blinking dash in the corner before rebooting after about ten minutes.
I *can* boot into Safe Mode, so I figured I might try to narrow down the issue. I set it to create a bootlog, let it do its thing, waited for it to freeze, then when it rebooted I went into Safe Mode, except there's no bootlog.txt anywhere on the system.
At this point, I've tried everything. I've tried reinstalling the OS, I tried using a bootable MS-DOS 6.22 CD to delete the HDD partition to get the 98 setup to format the hard drive again, I've tried going step by step in the boot, it's just not working. I'm really at a complete loss.
Currently, there's a Pentium 4 @ 3.2GHz in there (HT disabled), 256MB of RAM, a 250GB SATA HDD, two IDE CD drives (I've tried using both the master and slave drive), and a GeForce 4 MX 440. I've also tried seeing if there's some legacy SATA setting in the BIOS but so far I'm not finding anything obvious. If anyone can help, I'd really appreciate it.
