Wipe Disk clean or reasonable facsimile

The problem I have is, I have 2 computers (One has no A drive, the other does). It has memory and all except the previous owner said he tried to load Win98 SE in it and he couldnt get it to boot. I took it home and when I try to load my win98 CD into it, I get a message saying:

An exception OE has occired at 0028 :C0256F97 in VxD ---, This was called from 0028 :C147C3B4 in VxD ---,
It may be possible to continue normally. "

I tried both options (press any key to continue) and using the restart combo
(CTRL+ALT+DEL)

On the other (used ot have win95, was upgraded to win98se but old settings weren't saved in neither wen upgraded) that does the same except it keeps taking me to a DOS looking screen but I cant boot it up.

Is there any way I can wipe the hard drive clean and reload 98SE or I'm I dead in the water?

Also, could I take the memory or RAM or whatever it is and put it in a computer I have? How do I determine
if it is the type my computer can use?

Thanks in Advance

 

I have had to do this several times for one reason or another. I have always used a Western Digital Bios disk. It wipes the computer totally blank and reinstalls the bios on it. You can choose the Fat 16 or Fat 32 partitioning. (Fat 16 gives you about 5 partitions and Fat 32 gives you A: C: & D.) After that you can reinstall your windows 98 beautifully.

 

Get a bootdisk, double click the downloaded file with a floppy in the drive and one will be created for you.
Boot up and choose with CDRom support, watch the screen for the drive letter for the CD, it will not be the usual letter.
Boot with the boot floppy, then type in these commands at the prompt:
format c:
Type a Y that you want to format.
X:\win98\setup.exe
Where X is the letter for the CD drive.

After installing windows and before you install any hardware drivers, install the motherboard drivers first thing, if needed.

The floppy drive can be interchanged between the two for an install process. Be sure the BIOS recognizes it as the first drive in the boot sequence.

Or, if you have the full install or OEM CD, not an upgrade.
You can take the hard drive out of the one without the floppy, swap it with the one with the floppy, enter the BIOS and have it Auto detect the drive, boot with the boot floppy, choosing CDrom support and do these commands at the prompt:
format c: /s
c:
md\win98
copy X:\win98\*.* c:\win98
This will format the hard drive and make the drive bootable [the /s], with the windows setup files copied onto it. Put it back into the other computer, boot up, at the prompt;
c:\win98\setup
Windows will install off of the hard drive. This is a good thing to do as if you ever remember getting asked to insert the windows CD, it won't now. It will just go to the C:\Win98 folder and get what it needs.

Brightspot:
Western Digital has a Diagnostic Disk for the hard drive.
I have yet to see a BIOS on a hard drive, just a bit of confusion here?

 

Going to try both suggestions. Thanks for the replies, fellas. I'll let you know what happens.