problem making dual boot on two drives.

[embeare]

Help please, am going crazy trying to install Win XP Home.
ECS K7S5a latest bios/AMD XP2400/ Nvidia geoforce 2/ 512 of 2100 mem/ DVD cdrom and separate CDRW and 15Gb HDD and ADDING New 80GB HDD
The system was fine for a long time running Win 98SE until my second (D, 40GB) HDD packed up. C drive with OS still fine so changed faulty one for new 80GB.
Set as slave, BIOS found new drive,
Used win 98 startup disk to FDISK new drive as 1 created logical partition, DID NOT format as wanted XP (NTFS) on the drive to give me fully windows controlled dual boot machine with Win 98SE on C drive and Win XP separate on D drive.
All seemed to be going ok until XP setup runs so far and comes back with "error 768 at line 5199 (+ line 5182) in D:\xpsprtm\base\boot\setup\setup.c"
followed by a "stop:0x0000007B ( 0xF8981524,0xC0000034,0x00000000,0x00000000)
I have searched lots of helpdesks and got some tips and suggestions but none will get me past this point.
The Microsoft site says possible virus in boot sector but full search(with AVG) and Scandisk have found nothing and it cannot be on D: cos this is not formated yet until XP fires up. Also the codes in the stop message are supposed to be some help to support teams to help pinpoint trouble. ANY IDEAS ladies and Gents?
If all else fails I shall have to just do full new XP install to new HDD and reluctantly try to install a front end boot manager(unreliable).
As I said earlier HELP!!!! in laymans terms please as I'm nearly all techied out now!.
Sorry for the length of post or excessive detail...
Mike

[embeare]

Not sure if this has any bearing on problem but after useing AVG to check C: for viruses the test result was MBR partition OK but reading errors in boot sector, I'm thinking this is the unfinished /corrupt XP install bumff.
This aside the PC still (touch wood) boots OK through bios to the dual boot option screen and into Win 98 option OK each time but always fails to complete and gives the same error every time in XP.

Thanks in anticipation Mike

[glc]

Boot 98 into COMMAND PROMPT ONLY and do a SCANDISK to make sure there are no file system errors.

Make a Win98 startup disk. Boot with it, CD support not necessary. At the A prompt, DEL C:\BOOT.INI - then DEL C:\NTLDR - then FDISK/MBR - then when you get the A prompt back, SYS C:

[embeare]

do you mean opening a dos window within win 98 and run scandisk on c: and then do the del tasks from dos at boot up?
will fdisk /mbr not erase all the stuff on the c:drive and negate the reinstall of win 98 or will it just redo the mbr partition and boot sector?
Thanks Mike

[glc]

No, I meant run SCANDISK from true DOS. Hit F8 to get the boot menu and choose COMMAND PROMPT ONLY.

fdisk/mbr simply rewrites the MBR. Takes about 3 seconds and you will not see anything happen, it will just return to an A prompt.

[embeare]

Many thanks glc but alas I could not go on any longer, I kept getting all sorts of boot failures being finally unable to get to the A prompt from three different win 98 boot floppies so I have now finnally lost the data on the old c: drive as I was able to del the boot.ini but it could not recognise del c:\ ntldr. I think it was $ltdr$ (corrupt) eventually after fdisk/mbr could not even recognise the c: drive.
Have reluctantly given in and am now simply running XP on the new 80Gb and am going to clear the c drive and reformat as extra storage space.
Again many thanks for the ideas anyway.