installing xp then back to 98 now nothing will install

[econtrerasguzman]

My friend had windows 98 and then installed XP and since the drivers didnt work he tried installing 98 but now nothing worked, i tried helping him tried installing the 98 CD and also the XP CD and nothing, for the windows 98 CD it boots up but when it comes to formatting it wont start, and for the XP cd it says "booting from CD: " but the setup never starts

anybody got any ideas to help my friend?

[guns1inger]

Once you upgrade to XP, you can't go back without a format and fresh install, as you have discovered. When he set up 98, did he create the recommended rescue disk on floppy ? If so, try booting off it instead, and using the fdisk command. If you don't have one, you could try here http://www.bootdisk.com/

[econtrerasguzman]

thanx a lot i think ima try that boot disk, i tried fdisk but didnt work

[handyguy]

This could be fun to try too, free, a complete windows environment on a dvd:
Bart's Preinstalled Environment (BartPE) bootable live windows CD/DVD

http://www.nu2.nu/pebuilder/

[snafu099]

I had to put my drive as non-boot in existing xp system and from admin tools delete all the partitions

[econtrerasguzman]

i was wondering is it possible for me to format the hard drive in another computer as fat32 and then move it back to the pc i want to install windows 98 on, would that be possible? or buying a new hard drive and installing? would that work?

[Garibaldi]

i was wondering is it possible for me to format the hard drive in another computer as fat32 and then move it back to the pc i want to install windows 98 on, would that be possible? or buying a new hard drive and installing? would that work?

You can try the system rescue cd too - www.sysresccd.org. Use the run_qtparted command after booting it to get you into Qtparted. You can then use that to reformat the existing partition to fat32 (and maybe even NTFS I think). That should fix any post-xp problems.

This could be fun to try too, free, a complete windows environment on a dvd:
Bart's Preinstalled Environment (BartPE) bootable live windows CD/DVD

http://www.nu2.nu/pebuilder/

So is this like a windows live-cd? I remember hearing about something like this that was open source but it wasn't very far along. Is this just an implementation of the windows API or is it a modified copy of windows?