Having trouble with Win 98 installer

[Buck]

I am trying to replace Windows ME with Windows 98 on an old laptop (Omnibook XE2). I rearanged the boot order in the bios so that the DVD drive would boot first, started the computer, and the cd came up and the menus worked, but I couldn't read anything on the screen because the text was gibberish and scrambled across the screen.

I tried an old Win 98 Boot Floppy, it worked with no issues, I ran D:\setup, it ran scandisk and started the install process, but I got an error that said I needed to get the "Upgrade" disk, because of a version of Windows already on the Hard Drive, so I rebooted into the floppy, ran FDISK, deleted the partition, re-created the partition, and tried the whole thing again (Getting to the 98 setup on the CD by going through the floppy). Then the installer asked me if I wanted to run setup, I pressed "Y," text saying something about diagnostics about to run went by very quickly and the diagnostics appeared NOT to run, and I got the gibberish again on most of the screen, except I could pick out a message saying that the Windows Installer needed a certain number of bytes to run.

I then tried running the Ultimate Boot CD that I got a torrent of online, it booted up fine on its own, I ran "Free FDISK," redid the partitioning because there was some letter after FAT32 that I thought could be messing up my partition, tried the Windows 98 thing again, and got the same problem.

Any suggestions on how I can proceed with the Windows 98 installer?

Thanks!

[Scarecrow Man]

You will probably need to Format the drive after you fdisk it.

Run the Windows 98 boot disk again, and type Format C:. Then try to install Windows.

If you are using an upgrade version of 98, you may need to provide a full copy of a previous version like 95.