ide drivers?

With an AMD processor, your chip-set is either an AMD, ALI, SiS, or VIA.

You still need to identify the motherboard or the chips on the motherboard.

If you can burn the drivers onto a CD, you can boot from your W98 startup disk and copy the files from the CD onto your hard drive.

At the DOS prompt, follow these commands:

C: (press enter)
MD drivers (press enter)
cd drivers (enter)

Change to the drive letter that the startup utility assigned to your CD drive.
It will be at least F:

F: (enter)
If needed, change to the folder that the drivers are located in.

Then, copy the drivers to the hard drive.

copy *.* c:\drivers *.*

Boot into Windows and run the setup program for the drivers.

Since I have run into this kind of problem more than once, what I do when I setup a new PC is as follows:

I place the hard drive in a "Hot-Swap" bay on my main PC.

I partition the drive with at least 1 logical drive on an extended DOS partition. (Typically, I make this drive at least 2GB in size.)

I then copy the Windows CD and ALL driver files for the target system.

I then install the drive on the target system.

When I boot from the startup disk, I browse to the drive and folder where I copied the Windows CD and run setup from there.

I NEVER need to insert the Windows CD to install devices or network components.
I don't have to worry about the instances where Windows needs the CD but can't yet find the CD drives.

Come to think of it, that is another option for you.
Boot from the startup floppy.
Choose which hard drive has enough extra space for the W98 CD. (450MB)
Create a folder on the drive such as W98
Insert the W98 CD and use the Xcopy command.

xcopy F: C:\W98

I'm rusty on my DOS commands. I think you need to set a couple of switches to copy the sub-folders.

Just do a web search on xcopy and you should find a site that will detail how to use the command.

Chas

My computer is not booting from the floppy drive or the cd rom drives either???/

so I cannot copy from the cd rom to c drive

Sounds like a Buss problem to me, you have one drive streaming on the Buss and killing all others.

Go into the Bios and find out what is being recognized (Maxtor, WD, DVD, CD), change boot to Floppy then CD and lastly HD. This should allow booting off a floppy. If not remove cables from all HD, CD and DVD, if it boots off a floppy then you have a bad controller card on one of the drives. Add them one at a time to find out which is the offending unit.

BTW - Have one Bigfoot HD, and 2 Mitsumi CD (R-RW) that all have this problem (streaming on the buss), results in no available boot device.

You need a windows 98 boot disk that has CDROM support on it. But if the floppy drive isn't working you need to address that problem first.
In the system BIOS you may need to set the boot order to allow for the floppy to be a bot device. To get into the bios hit the delete key when prompted to on the screen just after turning on the PC>. Some systems use the F1, F2 or F10 keys. You can also press and hold a key while turning on the system and that will produce a keystuck error and it may give a message to go into the BIOS or continue booting. Take the choice to go into the BIOS. The choice for the boot order is either across the top or in the advanced features settings. Don't make any other changes. Make sure that the floppy is in the bootup options.

If the floppy light stays on all the time the ribbon cable on it is backwards. The ribbon cable has a colored strip along one edge which notes where the first connection or pin one is.

If you don't have a win98 boot disk, go to www.mybootdisk.com and get the files to make a bootable floppy that will also install the CDROM drivers.

After you get the computer to start nd if you've ran fdisk and have formatted the drive you can run the windows installation. If you want to copy the windows files onto the hard drive use the following commands followed by enter.

d:
md d:\win98
cd win98
copy e:\win98\*.* /s

After the files finish copying you can run the setup of windows from the current location.

You need to set your computer to boot to a floppy first. This is done in cmos.

You need a win98 boot disk with cdrom drivers on it.

You can download this from www.bootdisk.com

Now boot to the floppy and the cdrom drivers will load.

Lee