hp omnibook 2100 wont boot from disk

I have an hp omnibook 2100 / originaly running win95 /currently winNT / it has 2.1 gig HD , pentium 200 mmx , 64 mb ram ,change out cd rom & floppy when i got the laptop the HD was blank and all i had to put on it was winNT it installed fine .. now i want to install win98 I also want to switch to a larger HD which i did a 4.? gig with win2000 on it but it wont run on my lap top because it was configed to a diff. laptop it will not even let me go to dos mode i have tried to erase the HD w/ kill disk neither hard drive will let me change to win 98 any help will be greatly appreciated thank..

 

Was the hard drive swapped from an identical laptop? If not, then the drive probably isnt compatible. Even if it is the same, you will not be able to boot windows. You'll need to reformat, or do a repair install of Win98/win2k at least, by booting from the Windows isntallation CD.

 

thanks GOLDFISH but i cant even get the original HD to do any thing either not even go to dos i think the new HD would be ok if i could erase it and do a clean install

 

Can you get into BIOS? And can you boot from a CD? Does the machine boot at all?

 

i can get to bios it works fine w/ win NT that is on the 2.1gHD but i still cant upgrade to win 98 or erase the 2.1gHD and start over .... ican get to bios w/ the4.? gHD also but i can not erase this HD either neither will but from cd or floppy

 

If you can't boot from CD... (how did you install the OS in the first place?) .... then you'll have to MAKE it boot from CD, somehow, and go thru window setup (which will let you format the drive)

 

when i first installed nt the drive was completly blank it loaded the nt disk with no problm. i can load software on it but it will not run win98 upgrade.. but the 4.? gHD wont even let me do any thing

 

Go into the Bios and change the boot device order to 1. CD-ROM, 2. Floppy drive, 3. Hardrive. Use a Win98 boot floppy to boot the machine with. Use FDISK to delete the partition and reformat. Ultimate Boot CD is another great tool for doing this, and can be downloaded from this site. Win98 boot disk can be downloaded from bootdisk.com, but you will need a blank floppy to make it with, as the file is a WinImage self extracting file.

 

thanks for every ones help i finaly got it to boot unfortunatly with win nt instead of win 98 now i will just try to upgrade to win98 ...