So I take it your old machine is made by RM ?!?
 
If not then there is most likely not going to be anything you can do as I would think this is a customized OEM recover CD, it most likely is looking at some DMI info in the motherboard BIOS to check for this being an RM machine.

You could try to copy only the cab files (whole WIN98 directory) from the CD to the hard drive, then run setup from the WIN98 folder on the hard drive, I did this before, a long time ago, but I cant remember if it worked or not:)

here's an idea!
 
insert your win98 bootdisk into your a: drive
 
when the Windows 98 Statup menu appears, hold down the shift key and press F5, for the command prompt.
type in:
 
fdisk /mbr
 
(you may have to press Y at some stage to accept the changes being made.)
 
this will completely reset the hard drive of any associations with its manufacturer!
 
then run fdisk the usual way...delete your primary partition...create another primary partition, then format your new active partition (c: drive).
 
that may work!
 
hope it helps!
 
Phoenix

Nope, the "problem" is in Windows 98 CD or should i say "Windows RM CD"...
Only fix for this is to buy non-OEM cd.

or figure out what files were modified in the OEM ver to make it different from the NON-OEM ver and replace the OEM files with the Non OEM files, of course to do that legally you'd have to have an original NON OEM Disc.