Thanks for the advice peeps but the BIOS is set to auto detect all four
IDE channels & I took great care to ensure that the jumper settings on the
back of the drives were set properly.
As long as I was just adding my new drive into the vacant slave on ch2,
Win98 would boot up fine. If I tried any other combo such as CDrw master &
CDrom slave on ch2, the CMOS would see the drives correctly at the start of
the boot but the process would never finish! I got as far as the Win98 logo
but not as far as seeing my desktop!
From the logged boot, it looks as though it freezes whilst loading the
mouse drivers, although I'm not absolutely sure as being a complete newbie
at this, I don't really know how to interpret boot logs properly!
I've needed my pc for the last few days but when I have some time, I'll
try some of the suggestions from the superb sites that you've directed me
to! I wanted to understand what was causing my boot faliure as I'm also
going to attempt to replace my harddrive soon so the more I learn about the
IDE interface, the better!
Thanks once again!