Hi jxrry59,

I am afraid that we are both in a catch 22 situation here? as we do not have all the info. OK let's figure out a game plan.

He has WIN98, so he should have:

1. A win 98 CD
2. A win 98 Boot/recovery/installation disk

If his machine will not boot into safe mode, but will accept a re-install, he MUST have got it to fire up from either the Win98 boot disk, or CD....otherwise he would not know that?

When a machine will not boot into safe mode my usual reaction is to reformat and re-install. Our problem here is that we do not know WHY it won't boot WIN98 anymore? and we do not know if it will support an upgraded version of Windows.

Might I run this gameplan past you?

PLAN "A"

1. Go there and check the specs of the machine, and see if it meets the Minimum requirements suggested by Microsoft.
2. Boot from his Win98 floppy, and format the disk
3. If the machine is up to spec. install Win2k
4. If the machine is not up to spec. install Win98
I believe that this is more likely to work than trying to install directly into unknown territory.


PLAN "B"

This means that you were not able to format the disk. That means that you must have a serious hardware problem.

Run scandisk from the floppy, with a full surface scan of the hard drive and try again.

If none of that works, you had better get back to me with the details of the equipment, and what happened. Hopefully you will have had some more meaningful error messages. I am beginning to think that his hard drive might be dead.

Good Luck!