Montjuleant

Hi, thanks everyone for the swift and detailed replies, and I apologize for not being able to respond until now! As I'm not going to be able to be in possession of any floppy disks until tommorrow, (I should have mentioned, I -DO- have a floppy disk drive on the system), I decided to try and extract the install disk's contents onto my 2nd hard drive from within windows, then boot into the MS-DOS boot image, and run the set-up off of that. This was successful, but shortly into the install I was kicked out due to my primary drive being formatted in NTFS, (It still had Windows XP on it at this point). I rebooted into MS-DOS, and ran FDISK to format the drive, and restarted. After restarting and choosing to boot from CD, however, on the "Start Setup from CD", "Start Windows With CD-ROM Support", etc, screen, my attention was diverted elsewhere for a short moment, and I neglected to choose to start without CD-ROM support before the timer counted down, and it tried to start the setup from CD again... and this time, it worked!? I may be speaking a bit too soon, as I'm only formatting the drive in the Windows ME setup, and have not yet fully installed it, but it seems to be working now, despite me changing almost nothing on the system. The only things I did change between this attempt at installing, and my previous one earlier this morning, was I had two drives formatted with NTFS, which are now FAT32, and I swapped out my dying AGP nVidia graphics card for an ancient PCI "Trident TGUI 9680" I found in an older system, and swapped from using AGP to PCI for my video output in my BIOS. Could this have had an effect? Also, sorry for a lack of information on the system. I was unable to get any information from the Dell link submix8c posted regarding my system configuration, and at this point I don't really want to try and remove my CD drive, but one of the two CD Drives I tried the disk on, (Which I did a very poor job of mentioning in the OP post) was a Mitsumi, Model No. CRMC-FX810T4.

I'm not quite sure on the terminology, but I believe it is hanging in the boot image; It hasn't actually gotten into the windows setup yet. One more thing I forgot to mention, if I choose the "Start computer without CD-ROM support" option, I'm able to get into what I believe is MS-DOS without issue, which leads me to believe it may be something with the CD-ROM driver. I don't have any floppy drives to test out booting from as of right now, but I should be able to get some within a day or two from a friend, I'll give that a shot as soon as I'm able.

Hi, I figured I'd throw a question by you guys, as you seem to know a thing or two more about Windows 9x than the average internet user. After running into some performance issues trying to run an older game, "The Neverhood", I decided I'd re purpose my old Windows XP desktop with a copy of everyone's favorite operating system, Windows ME. So, I put in the disk and started it up, but almost immediately ran into a strange issue: After booting from disk, at the "Microsoft Windows Millennium Startup Menu", where one can choose to start windows setup from CD, or start computer with or without CD support, immediately after I choose "Start Windows Sets the up from CD-ROM", the system shows the information for the CD-ROM driver, then just stops. It's not frozen at this point, as the terminal cusor is still sitting there, blinking rapidly, but the system is completely unresponsive, and not performing anything after this point. (The CD-ROM drive is clearly not active shortly after reaching this point). For further clarity, here's the last thing that gets printed to the screen where the system halts: This driver is provided by Oak Technology, Inc.. 0TI-91X ATAPI CD-ROM device driver, Rev D91XV352 (C)Copyright Oak Technology Inc. 1987-1997 Device Name : 0EMCD001_ As for the hardware, it's a slightly modified Dell Dimension 4100. It uses the stock motherboard and processor, a 1 ghz Pentinum 3, and currently has one stick of 128 MBs of Ram. I've got two hard drives hooked up, the primary being a 80 GB, and secondary being a 32 GB. It's also got a somewhat trashed nVidia mx/mx 200 series card, which upon installing a driver for, completely prevents the system from booting, but otherwise works fine as a way of displaying video output without it. More specific information on the system can be found at: ftp://ftp.dell.com/Manuals/all-products/esuprt_desktop/esuprt_dimension_desktops/dimension-4100_Service%20Manual_en-us.pdf Despite my best efforts, both in trying out different configurations and wearing out google, I'm unable to find a solution to this issue. I've installed Windows 98 successfully on the system before, so I highly doubt it's a matter of a specific piece of hardware not working on the system, and have tried using another CD-ROM drive to run the set-up from, trying out three different disks for the system on each; All stopped at the exact same point. I've also gone and removed every PCI card, but it had no effect on anything. Does anyone have any other things I could try? I guess my next step would be to try Windows 98 again, but I'd really like to try and get ME on it, if at all possible. (Also, sorry for the somewhat long post, I wanted to make sure it was as thorough as possible!)