Forgot more than most know

Only kidding, BUT...
I have a person that needed a machine to operate 98. I found some components slapped together a machine and installed a 98 boot disk.
So ar so good After it prompts me to enter the drive letter for the CD ROM and comand "setup" it starts to check the registry for drive space.
It starts to say Win requires X amount of space and then it stops halfway through the sentence. The drive eventually slows down and stops and the system hangs.
I checked the BIOS everything looks AOK
What am I missing? or doing wrong
I ran Fdisk to put a DOS partition on the drive as I did format it a while ago.

ASUS P3v4x P3Slot1 1000mhz, 256 meg ram, WD40 gig HD, Sony CD/RW

 

I would create a folder on the hard drive in DOS, then copy the contents of the Win98 CD into the folder & try the install from there.