Install Me Crazy

I have a comp someone gave me. They said it had a bad hard drive the reason they were getting rid of it. It would boot to the windows 98 pic and stop ..froze up??..Ithought maybe a re-install would help..so i formatted the drive and started ...but when it got to installing it would just freeze...i put in another drive ..same thing....virus is disabled..every thing slicks along until it starts installing....go figure confused ...any ideas????...on and by the way scandisk says both drives are okay