What kind of hard drive are you using? Is this the first time you've tried to reformat and reinstall your OS?

Does your motherboard have a Clear CMOS/Bios jumper or firmware write protect setting? If you haven't disabled boot partition virus protection in CMOS, you will run into problems installing.

Many hard drives have proprietary disk management software installed which can sometimes create difficulties when you try to reinstall an operating system. To ensure you have a clean AND complete uninstall use the Debug Utility from your 98 floppy (instructions from Award "Bios Secrets Guide":

Debug Utility - Deletes all data on the master boot record of the drive
Note: This deletes everything on the hard drive.

1. Boot the system from a DOS floppy disk. This must be a bootable DOS 5.0 or above disk. The floppy must have these DOS files: FDISK.EXE, FORMAT.COM, DEBUG.EXE and SYS.COM.
2. Type debug and enter these lines at the prompt:
F 200 L200 0
a 100 [Note: at this point the prompt will change]
mov ax,301
mov bx,200
mov cx,1
mov dx,0080 [Note: use 0081 for second fixed disk.]
int 13
int 3
[Press Enter to leave a blank space here.]
G=100
q
Then press the Enter key. The drive should now have no partitions on it. Use Fdisk to set up the drive and then format it according to your operating systems’ manual.
To partition the drive:
3. At the A: prompt, type fdisk. (Note: For Drives larger than 8.4Gig you will need WIN 98 or higher)
4. Select option 5 to choose a drive in a two or more drive system.
5. Type the number of the drive you want to partition.
Warning! FDISK will automatically partition the first physical drive, unless specified otherwise, from within menu choice 5. If you have a working first drive, then you will not want to re-partition it.
6. You are now back at the main menu. Select option 1 to create a primary DOS partition or logical drive.
7. Select 1 again to create a primary DOS partition.
8. Press Enter to choose the available size. Reboot when instructed.
To format the drive:
1. Boot the system from a DOS floppy disk. This must be a bootable DOS 5.0 or above disk (the WIN 9x startup disk is OK). The floppy must have these DOS files: FDISK.EXE, FORMAT.COM,
DEBUG.EXE and SYS.COM.
2. At the prompt, type FORMAT c: /u /s. Press Enter to confirm that this is what you want to do.
Note: If this is the second drive you are formatting, replace the drive letter C above for the letter of the drive that you are formatting.
3. When the disk is formatted, the A: prompt reappears.

See if any of this helps - hopefully it will.

V.