All, thx for your help regarding using a second hard drive and the original as a slave to save my files....thankyou very much!? I attempted to reload windows and still encountered the start up error of ieexplore.exe that would freeze the system.? I decided it was time to reformat/wipe the hard drive and start anew before skipping it across a lake.? I wiped out the hard drive, but can't figure out how to run the sys.com file in the edb.cab file on the win98 startup disk.? I was told now that I created a new drive, the system has to recognize/name it in order to load windows.....basically I'm asking "what next" since I deleted and recreated the partition from fdisk!? Thanks!

You should just be able to put a bootable floppy (Win98) into the A drive and boot your system. Select "with CD Rom support" from the menu and continue to load that way. :-)