Use your Win98 startup disk. Make sure you use a current one - ie, one that is created by your Win98SE, not an old one lying around from an earlier Win98.
If in doubt, Control Panel, Add/Remove Programs, Startup Disk.
Boot from your startup disk. This will give you Fdisk and Format, the tools you need to clean off your HDD, plus a fair bit more. There is also a good help file on how to use the utilities provided by the startup disk. It will also give you access to your CDROM drive so you can re-load Win from the CD.
You may also need to use your MAXTOR software as well as or instead of some of the MS software on the startup disk - you'll have to read up on your Maxtor documentation, I'm not familiar with it.
If your Win98SE is an
upgrade version, then I
think the 98SE startup disk will satisfy the Windows version checking that Setup does. Maybe someone else can help out here.
If not, you may have to install your old Win98, then run the win98SE upgrade.
After you've re-installed, you will have IE 4.0, or whatever they supply on the Win98SE CD. Somewhere on your system there should be all the IE5.5 SR-1 files that you downloaded - they are not auto-erased after installation like other MS update files, so you shouldn't have to download them again. Restore them from your back-up if needed, then run the file iesetup.exe. Then go to the Windows Update site to refresh your Critical Updates - they will have been lost when you cleaned off your system drive.
Hope this helps. (Been there, have the T-shirt
, but forgotten some of the details)
AA
[This message has been edited by Ausatco (edited 07 January 2001).]