You can always boot from a floppy to install 98SE.

Oh well, I guess I'll have to live with it... I just booted MS-DOS 6.22 and ran various benchmarks using a hard-drive from another system - everything ran smoothly, everything (CPU, RAM, hard-drive) behaved as it should; the only issue seems to be with IDE optical drives, and only when booting from them...

I think booting from CD was rather new back then and it took some time to get it right.

AFAIK, none of the official Win98 CDs were bootable... those early bootable CD systems weren't perfect as hal said... it's possible that your system was booting off the slowest PIO mode, or your drive is just stupid

try a different drive and see what happens... check the BIOS settings for the PIO and DMA mode stuff.... by the time the PIIX3 boards came out, the settings should be there if you have a good BIOS... if that doesn't work still, you can always use the Triones DMA drivers to make the CD drive run in DMA mode in DOS, and starting the Win98 install should make it go faster

It wasn't an official Win98 CD, but most of the debugging was performed using Linux CDs anyway... I tried two drives, both of which work just fine on other systems, so I guess I cannot blame them. As far as I remember, all PIO / DMA settings in BIOS were "AUTO" - even if the problem lies there, is it possible that the same settings work when booting from a hard-drive, but not when booting from an optical drive?

You could try http://www.plop.at/en/bootmanager.html if it works there then it's definetly your BIOS

one other thing to consider.... if the CD was using shitty media to begin with or is really old, the dyes may have degraded causing the disc to be hard to read... this is especially true with old drives that have worn out lasers... even if the drive was lightly used, the old drives don't have quite as powerful of lasers as today's DVD drives

first try copying the disc to a new disc.... use quality media and burn at slowest speed possible... do not think quality media = popular/good brand... that doesn't matter because TDK, sony, etc all outsource their CD/DVD media manufacturing to CMC magnetics, ritek, etc.... the only way to determine what you have is to check the media id code using a program such as CD diagnostics or a burning program such as imgburn.... taiyo yuden media has always been the best... they are sold under the JVC brand overseas

TheMAN wrote:

AFAIK, none of the official Win98 CDs were bootable...

OEM is.

I'd suggest SmartBootManager or stick to a Win98SE bootdisk

I always burn CDs at slowest speed possible 😀 - however this does not seem to be the issue here either (same drives with same Linux CDs - I use them often for memtest purposes - work just fine on other systems)... I'll stick to booting from floppy when installing an OS then, as I said, there's no issue booting from the hard-drive.

iulianv wrote:

I always burn CDs at slowest speed possible 😀

This might result in bad burns. I bought once a batch of CD-Rs and burned them at different speed. And the result was, that the best speed was a bit below the speed that the CD-Rs were rated. Burns at slowest speed resulted in much more errors.