Why can't I install 98?
Question
Just found out it is a brand new hard drive. When it was installed one of the pins got bent. I went ahead and took care of that. Now my win98 disk boots up as the notebook is started. No more waiting 10 minutes for it to boot up. I start the 98 setup process, but the I get the error message. "An error was detected while formatting your primary hard disk partition." I press enter to quit setup. It then looks like it takes me to dos. Just
shows me the D:\>. I went ahead and did the whole fdisk setup. Deleted and created primary partition. It still comes up with the same error. I went ahead and tried to format c: and got the bad command or file name. Went
ahead and did format c: /s and got the same message. I searched on google and read another solution. Which was "If you receive a "Bad command" or "Bad file name" error message you may need to extract the Format.com tool to your boot disk. It will not work for me. The extract ebd.cab format.com came up with this "ERROR: cannot open file EBD.CAB. Then I went ahead and put the 98 cd on my desktop pc and put that "format.com" on a floppy and tried to boot it. Thank for the help.
Answer
This question was answered on November 14, 2005. Much of the information contained herein may have changed since posting.
Is your primary partition set to active? In FDisk when you create a primary partition you also need to make it active so the CMOS knows which partition to format. It is option number two from the FDisk main menu. This is not done automatically, even if there is only one partition.
Author
Posted by Nathan of Chandler-Gilbert Community College on November 14, 2005
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