You say the Win XP CD was not a bootable CD (I assume that's what you mean.) Try booting into DOS using the Win 98 boot disk, then changing to your CD drive at the command prompt (usually by typing D: \ [without the space there - damn smilies!] or whatever your drive letter is) and running the Win XP CD from there (type setup and press enter). Unless it's an upgrade-only CD it should still install on a clean hard disk, it doesn't have to be bootable.
Windows 95 and (I believe) the first edition of 98 didn't support disk sizes of greater than 2GB - i remember when I ran Windows 95 all those years ago and had a 10GB hard drive put in, it had to be split into 5 partitions to be usable. If you've got an old copy of Windows 98, that may be your problem.
Last edited by bjkeates; 8th December 2006 at 05:21.
Reason: Removing inadvertent smiley!