Problems installing Windows 98

A guy from work accidently wiped his hard drive and I'm trying to intall windows 98 for him on his Compaq Presario 1247 Laptop. It would not install XP(not enough memory) I performed FDisk and wiped everything and made a non-partitioned drive. I popped the 98 CD in and rebooted.
Chose boot from CD
Chose Start windows 98setup from cd-rom.
Then it says Error
Setup cannot instal Windows 98 on your computer
An error was detected while formatting your primary hard disk partitiom
*Press ENTER to quit setup

Any thoughts

How to Install Windows 98 on a Computer with No Operating System

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;221829

and made a non-partitioned drive.

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I assume by that that you mean you made a single partition out of the whole drive.

If so, did you set the partition to active?

If you leave the drive unpartitioned, the Win98 cd will automatically partition and format it for you. If you tell it you want to use large disk support, it will make it all one partition.

the Win98 cd will automatically partition and format it for you. If you tell it you want to use large disk support, it will make it all one partition.

Click to expand...

Ok. I generally do that all thru fdisk though. I've never had an install hang once I've partitioned w/ fdisk. Once I've got the partitioning done, I use a win98 system disk to bootup, then format the HDDs, and *then* do the OS install.