-=> Quoting Lionel Hasselhoff to Leonard Erickson <=-

 LH> After much wrangling around I did manage to get the CD files copied
 LH> to a hard drive which I then installed from... 
 LH> I did find the option to make a startup disk on the old windows
 LH> system, but as that system only had an external parallel port CD-ROM
 LH> it did not include any ATAPI CD-ROM drivers, and did not have a valid
 LH> drive e: (the ATAPI CD-ROM) when I booted from it. 

Doesn't matter. The "make startup disk" makes a
"generic" startup disk,
not one custom configured to your system. It'll have a somewhat
"universal" CD-rom driver on it.

 LH> Now I am trying to hurdle another obstacle;  namely, the Intel 440BX-2
 LH> motherboard w/ Celeron 300A CPU not working properly with my hard
 LH> drives, or with W95 in general. 

 LH> I checked out Intel's web site and they are no longer providing any
 LH> kind of interactive support for that board.  It did mention that there
 LH> were two different BIOSes, tho', one which is "non-OS specific" and
 LH> one which is for W98, 2000, Me, and NT (I think). 

 LH> There particular error that occurs is that the system hung for several
 LH> minutes when I tried to run the setup.exe file, and then when I tried
 LH> to get a directory, after it listed the files, the total number of
 LH> files and the total number of dirs, and just before it listed the free
 LH> blocks the system hung for several minutes before returning to the
 LH> command prompt... 

Well, for starters, I'm surprised that a system that will take a 300
MHz CPU uses setup.exe rather than having the setup program in ROM.

 LH> Anyone know what the problem might be before I go risking a BIOS
 LH> update and a bunch of hardware configuring hassles? 

My first guess would be that you've got the drive parameters set wrong.

Second guess is that you've got some hard to read sectors on the drive
and the delay is due to repeated read attempts before getting it right.

 LH> BTW, the box I am using right now is a P166 MB/CPU combo which took
 LH> the installation just fine...So it isn't a generic software, or
 LH> harddrive only problem.  Part of it is definitely the 440BX-2. 

Another thought. How did you set the board for the CPU & RAM speed? 

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