windows 98 installation problems

I am trying to do a complete reinstall of windows 98 so I started out by using wipedrive 3.0 by white canyon software to completely erase any information on the hard drive. I then booted from my windows 98 boot disk selected without cd rom support, used fdisk to create my primary dos partition, I set it to active and had it use the whole disk. I then restarted by entering the restart command in dos and when the system reboots it starts to load from the disk drive and never stops it just keeps spinning and isnt doing anything with only a cursor displayed on the screen. I let it run all night and in the morning it was still doing the same thing, it wont load from the 98 boot disk. The only way that I can get it to load is by using a openbsd boot disk which loads up just fine and then changing the drive slightly by choosing to use all of the drive for openbsd and then saving a label to the disk and quiting and saving changes. I then reboot with the windows 98 boot disk in the drive and it loads up just fine but when i run fdisk again it shows that the partition is of a unrecognized type and I am back where I started as I then need to run fdisk again to make my primary partion etc and then when I restart I have the same problem that I had before. I have tried numerous things and I went on the microsoft knowledge base and followed the instructions on link to the T a couple of times and still no cigar. Anybody got any ideas or where to start? This system in the past has had this version of 98 on it before and the windows boot disk is not the problem as I have tried using a couple of them and I still get the same result. It has got to be something simple but I cant seem to figure it out.

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I then restarted by entering the restart command in dos and when the system reboots it starts to load from the disk drive and never stops it just keeps spinning and isnt doing anything with only a cursor displayed on the screen.

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when you said this did you mean the cdrom drive or floppy drive, because I was going to ask you if your computer boots from cdrom to try the cdrom instead of the boot floppy. But if you already tried the cdrom then this won't help.
Also, have you tried not setting the partition active. I'm not sure that it has to be active, but it probably does. If you ever get it to boot remember that you still need to do a format c:.
Hope you get it to run, and sorry I couldn't help more.

All you should have to do, is put your full copy of Win 98 inot the CD-ROM drive, make sure that the the CD-ROM drive is bootable, and that it is selected as a place for the computer to boot from. Then you need to select "start Setup from CD-ROM"

If that doesn't work for you then try to put a different CD-ROM in there and try that.

usually, its a good idea when using a boot disk to select the option that says start windows 98 using CD-ROM support. This loads the default drivers required for most of your CD-ROMS.