Hello I am tying to load windows 98se after I fdisk and format the PC. The cd loads and starts installing 98se but it gets to a certain point and the PC goes to a blue screen and stops installing. I thought it was the hard drive so I put a new one in and it did the same thing

deelow11206, hi, I congratulate you for going through the trouble installing a new drive.. that shows you've got initiative.. and a pretty good one, too... :)

Now, in a problem like this, the blue screen and the freezing errors can be caused by a whole slew of things. This is one of the many times when it's difficult to pinpoint what exactly is the cause, because the causes can be misleading.

However, based on my experience (and trying frustration.. lol) of sorting this out for for days, the problem can be narrowed down to several likely things , 2 of which I will mention.

If everything had worked fine before you did FORMAT and FDISK, and you know you did NOT fiddle around with the motherboard, or added more hardware parts to the motherboard or plug in more parts or devices to the power supply, then your computer may have the classic symptoms.

Now, to make sure it is not the old hard disk drive, use the new one. That way, you'll start fresh when you go through eliminating the causes one by one. On the other hand, computer parts can break down at any time.. silently, and there's no telling what the effects are.

The classic symptoms are:

1st, the very likely cause of the problem is in the hard drive controller and/or the memory card such as the SIMM, SDRAM, DDR, or RAMBUS. Ensure that your memory card (s) are firmly seated into its slot, and that you have NOT changed, switched, replaced, take in.. take out frequently, or otherwise have damaged the memory cards in any way previously.. such as touching it without grounding yourself by using an anti-static wrist strap or touching the metal part of the case 1st. If you don't take these precautions, somewhere down the road, a slight "touch" here and there to the internals of the motherboard can wreck total disaster to motherboard, and thus, your computer... Now, if your memory cards matche if you have more than 1 card & they are well seated, and the gold edges of the memory card has not been scratched off...

Then try the 2nd likely cause...

One or two of your hard disk drive (HHD) controllers may be the problem. It is the circuitry underneath the white and black rectangular slots on the motherboard that one end of the HDD cable is connected to. Now, a good way to test if either of the HDD controller is bad or has failed, you can run a special utility called SPINRITE from www.grc.com or POWERMAX in DOS mode from www.maxtor.com. Neither of these utilities are HDD specific, which means you can test your HHD... and thefore your HHD controller.. POWERMAX is free to download, but SPINRITE is not, costing about $80.00... However, if you would like to go this route, I can let you borrow mine. Please e-mail me at [email protected] and I will send it to you 'cause the size is really small.. only 94KB, but very, very powerful. :)