windows 98 help!

so today was going to be my day of reformatting my desktop, but the piece of shie is being... well, a piece of #. i've managed to reformat the drives, and when i get to the point of reinstalling windows 98 i get this error:

Error SU0013
Setup could not create files on your startup drive and cannot set up Windows. If you have HPFS or Windows NT file system, you must create an MS-DOS boot partition. If you have LANtastic server or SuperStor compression, disable it before running Setup. See SETUP.TXT on Setup Disk 1 or the Windows CD-ROM.

i have no idea what any of that means, so can someone explain it to me please? and what should i do? thanks in advance.

First, let's start with a couple simple questions:

Did you run the FDISK utility on the drive? Is it possible you deleted your Primary DOS partition and didn't re-create it?

Are you booting from a CD or from a floppy that allow CD access?

Have you run Scan Disk on the drive to make sure there are no bad sectors on the drive?

Can you gain access to C:\ after booting from a floppy?

Are you installing from the original OEM disk's that came with the PC?



[Edited on 5-5-2004 by Dr. Know]

Originally posted by Dr. Know
First, let's start with a couple simple questions:

Did you run the FDISK utility on the drive? Is it possible you deleted your Primary DOS partition and didn't re-create it? what's FDISK? i'm guessing i didn't run it, not knowing what it is.

Are you booting from a CD or from a floppy that allow CD access? yeah, that is exactly what i'm doing.

Have you run Scan Disk on the drive to make sure there are no bad sectors on the drive? yeah, it did that before going into the windows setup on the cd

Can you gain access to C:\ after booting from a floppy? i'm not sure. how could i try this?

Are you installing from the original OEM disk's that came with the PC? yeah



[Edited on 5-5-2004 by Dr. Know]

Originally posted by cmdrkeenkid

Originally posted by Dr. Know
First, let's start with a couple simple questions:

Did you run the FDISK utility on the drive? Is it possible you deleted your Primary DOS partition and didn't re-create it? what's FDISK? i'm guessing i didn't run it, not knowing what it is.

Are you booting from a CD or from a floppy that allow CD access? yeah, that is exactly what i'm doing.

Have you run Scan Disk on the drive to make sure there are no bad sectors on the drive? yeah, it did that before going into the windows setup on the cd

Can you gain access to C:\ after booting from a floppy? i'm not sure. how could i try this?

Are you installing from the original OEM disk's that came with the PC? yeah

Ok, we can rule out FDISK. It is basically a DOS partition utility that allows you to create larger, smaller, or logical partitions on a drive. Can only be run in DOS mode.

I assume you are booting from the OEM OS setup disk. It may be necessary to boot only from a DOS floppy that has access to the CD ROM. You should then try and run setup.exe from the CD ROM setup disk. Or have you tried this already?

To gain access to C:\ after booting from a floppy, at the A:/> prompt type C:. That will change your prompt to C:\>. Do a DIR to get a directory listing of the root of C:. If the drive was formatted properly you should zero files or 3 system files (depending on how you did the format). If you have multiple files and directories, then it hasn't formatted proplery. That could be part of the problem.

Originally posted by Dr. Know
I assume you are booting from the OEM OS setup disk. It may be necessary to boot only from a DOS floppy that has access to the CD ROM. You should then try and run setup.exe from the CD ROM setup disk. Or have you tried this already?

that's what i've done. when i start the setup disk and start to install windows i get the error i stated above.

To gain access to C:\ after booting from a floppy, at the A:/> prompt type C:. That will change your prompt to C:\>. Do a DIR to get a directory listing of the root of C:. If the drive was formatted properly you should zero files or 3 system files (depending on how you did the format). If you have multiple files and directories, then it hasn't formatted proplery. That could be part of the problem.

okay, that's what i thought you meant. i'm able to access the c: drive after booting from the floppy.

Error SU0013
Setup could not create files on your startup drive and cannot set up Windows. If you have HPFS or Windows NT file system, you must create an MS-DOS boot partition. If you have LANtastic server or SuperStor compression, disable it before running Setup. See SETUP.TXT on Setup Disk 1 or the Windows CD-ROM.


Seems interesting to me that it is asking for an MS-DOS partition...

Win98 requires a DOS partition to run and your drive should already be setup with a DOS partition.

You may need to delete your existing partitions and re-create them. That is where I would start before I tried to go any further with the setup disk.

I will not advise on this portion as I do not want to be responsible for damage associated with the use of this utility. You may want to contact someone local that know's how to use FDISK and let them advise you.

The error as I see it is complaining that your disk is formatted to the wrong standard. It should be formatted as fat or fat32. If you did format the disk as NTFS or HpFS then this is the problem.

The latter two types are for Windows NT/2k/XP only.

thanks for the help!

i did have to repartition the harddrive and that did the trick. thanks again.

Ahhhh....I so just love a happy ending.

Big Props to Dr. Know and Zzub!