internaughtfull wrote:

Hi,
I've got win98SE thats worked for quite awhile,
although recently when I boot up and the modem is plugged in
the USB port,

Get an ethernet card (if you don't already have one) and plug your modem
into the ethernet port (don't use USB).

I'm assuming this is a cable or DSL modem (broadband internet modem).

I have to do a clean install of win98 on *another disk that
has a Promise RAID controller on it. I know that when doing
a clean install of XP you have to hit F6 at a certain moment
and stick the driver in during setup--or, you can do it later
when the software wizard pops up.

Is there something similar with win98 I need to look out for?

Is this Promise controller for SATA drives, or IDE?

If it's for Sata, then is your boot or "c" drive going to be a SATA
drive? The promise controller should have a bios setup menu that you
can access when the system boots, and you can configure your SATA drives
to appear as if they were mapped to a virtual IDE controller (and
therefore not be raid-compatible).

If you leave the Promise controller set as a SATA controller (with or
without RAID enabled) then when you install windows 98, the installation
will proceed smoothly and you will notice nothing wrong, but windows
will be using compatability-mode access for the drive (ie - DOS mode).
To gain full 32-bit performance, you will need to install the promise
win-98 driver (assuming you have one). You can do this after win-98 has
been fully installed. You can't do that if you're installing XP (that's
why you need to provide XP the driver during the install process).

Regarding RAID - I don't think it's useful to enable RAID for windows
98. Certainly if you have only one hard drive, you can't run any form
of raid with only 1 physical hard drive in the system.

If your hard drive is larger than 128 gb, then there are some very
important issues that you need to consider.