Lastly maybe try cleaning the CD-ROM laser, the units are pretty easy to open up. Otherwise i would physically unplug and reconnect, don't just jiggle, the relevant IDE and power connections. If you haven't already tried, the easiest thing to test would be another IDE ribbon cable.

Any ideas on what's going on are very welcome. The only change to this machine that I can think of, since my last windows 98 reinstall about 2 months ago, was the removal of a slave sata-to-ide adaptered 80gb sata hdd on the same ribbon cable as the cdrom, BUT I cannot see how it can make any difference since I've always disconnected everything but the cd-rom and my system hdd for windows reinstalls. I've also tried it with 2 different ide cdroms now, configured as both master and cable select. The storage ports are set to run in 'compatibility mode', if I set them to run in 'enhanced mode', the system attempts to load the driver and fails (expected behaviour), so I know the drives are functional. The pc configuration is as follows: asus p5pe-vm mobo, c2d 6420, ide cdrom, sata 80gb hdd.

When I boot from cdrom and try to either 'start win98 setup' or 'start computer with cdrom support' the disc spins up, a message appears saying it's trying to load some 'oak technologies' driver for oemcd001 device and then it just stays there, the system does not freeze, I can ctrl-alt-del to restart and the cursor at the end of the message keeps blinking, but it doesn't load the driver. I used to be able to install windows 98 on this pc just fine, this is not the first time that I'm doing this with this very machine and my win98se cd, an original disc that came with an oem pc back in 2000. I have this really strange problem with my win98 pc.

Win98se boot iso download