Karl:
I ran into this same problem recently under slightly different
circumstances -- I was installing a new OEM version of Win98SE (install,
not upgrade) on a "sort of" new PC. New motherboard, new CPU, old hard
drive that had a thoroughly corrupted Win 95 installation on it. The
install program found fragments of the old OS, and my guess is that it
assumed (falsely) that I was trying to get around the MS anti-piracy
protections. I don't remember all of the details, but the gist of it was
that I used fdisk to remove all of the existing partitions on the drive.
Because the hard disk was truly empty, I had to use the MS-furnished
boot disk to get the installation started.
-- Carroll Grigsby

"K. Karl Kuller" wrote:
>
>     After putting together a new and faster computer and
> doing FDISK and FORMAT on the new hard drive, I tried to
> install my Win 98 from the CD that came with my old
> computer.  Instead of a smooth install (had previously
> re-intalled it on my old computer more than once without a
> problem), I was greeted with the message:  "Another
> operating system has been detected on your computer".
>     When I chose to continue and override the "phantom"
> system, I got the message: "You may have compressed system
> files on your computer.  Install has halted."
>     But I have nothing except the normal MS-DOS system files
> on an otherwise empty C: Drive.
>     Has anyone a solution to this paradox?  I cannot junk my
> old computer until I am able to install Win 98 on the new
> one.
>     Karl

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