Yes I know how to save the bios setting I have formated dozens of hard disks and I have a number of win98 startup discs, a dos boot disc simply will not boot the machine with this Hard disc as master, a bootable win 98 cd will not boot the machine with this hard disc in as master, it always boots from the hard disc ignoring the CD rom drive and the floppy drive.
I am doing everything right I assure you, Think I will try formating it in the machine as a slave,but as I stated in the earlier post,I am not sure if this will work.
Obviously there has to be some way of formating a hard disc with the win2k operating system installed, but it does not appear to be possible with the win 98 dos based operating sysyem.