Clean Install for an All-In-One Computer

We have an old NEC A1000 - All-In-One Computer, purchased in 1999. I believe Packard Bell bought out the company. Now I find they have since gone out of business. The story is:

We need to format this computer, however all I have on it is a Master Recovery CD. It came with Win98 on the system, then we upgraded to Win98se. This comp. was used for my daughter and has been through the mill & needs formatted really bad. It only has 4.5GB total and has less than 1.5GB left on it. My question is: Can I format this comp. with the win98se startup disk in the A: drive like I did on my other computer as recommended by Mark?

If you want to do a clean install, boot the computer with the floppy, choose with CDrom support. During the boot up process of the floppy, a message will appear giving you the drive letter for the CD. It will not be the usual letter, it could be E:. This message appears just before the "A:\>" appears. Use this letter in place of the "X" below.
Insert the 98SE CD, and do these commands. You do not need to use Fdisk.
format c:
Type a Y that you want to format when prompted.
Then install windows using this command.
X:\win98\setup

 

Yes that will work fine, although you would not need the full command X\:win98\setup. All you need to type is setup and press enter and it will find the drive by itself.

If however your Win98se disk is an upgrade disk then it will not work as it won’t find a copy of 98 on the drive to qualify you for the upgrade. You will first have to use the original recovery disk to put a fresh install of 98 on there and then do the upgrade.

 

It sounds like you will need to use the Recovery CD, and then install the Upgrade.
However, if this Recovery CD has a folder containing files named liked "Win98_XX.Cab ", "PreCopyX.Cab ", "BaseX.Cab ", "DriverXX.Cab" along with a bunch of others, there is a chance of doing a clean install of the Upgrade CD.
If so, start the install with the Upgrade CD, when prompted for a previous version, swap the CD's, and browse to that folder on the Recovery CD. The files in that folder will be examined. It should then prompt you to swap the CD's again when done.
If it fails, you will have lost nothing.