I found several apparently believable sites still with Win98 information using the Google search "Settings BIOS Windows 98" (without the quotes).

The keys most commonly cited for entering BIOS are Delete (common for Dell and some others) and F10 (usual for HP and other others). Almost any other key can be used, and only the computer manufacturer or the mother board builder can give an unambiguous answer for your machine. "F-keys" are most common, and normal "alphabet" keys haven't been used so far as I've seen. Ctl and/or Tab may have been used(?). See the list by Norval up above.

With Win98, you usually will hear a series of "beeps" when the machine is first turned on. The "beep codes" tell you that the computer is checking the keyboard, looking to see if a monitor is present, and a few other basic hardware checks. You also will normally see an instruction "flash by" that says "Press [some key name] to enter SETUP.

The key to "enter SETUP" is the one you want, if you see a message of this kind. Note that with some CRT monitors, the monitor "turn on" may be too slow to show the first few "messages" although this is rare. You may be able to plug a slow monitor into a separate outlet so the monitor is turned on and warmed up before you boot, if this appears to be happening. Unlike early Mac versions, DOS/Windows machines usually don't care about the order in which things are turned on.

You must press the appropriate key while the message is still on the screen, and hold it down until the desired result is completed.

[Usually, when you press a key, the scan code for that key is fed into the "keyboard buffer" and remains there until something "asks for it." Some of the startup checks do a "keyboard buffer dump" that empties the buffer, so the key must be held down to feed a continuous stream of "this key" values back into the buffer, so that one will be there when the system looks to see if the key was pressed.]

If you don't see the message, you need to choose a key to try, press at the first "beep," and hold it down until the machine gets done with the boot (or at least until it shows that the key didn't work and the machine is booting normal Windows).

If you don't' hear any "beeps," just press the key you want to try as soon as you hit the switch to turn the machine on, and hold it until the SETUP screen comes up or the machine ignores the key you tried and goes on into Windows. The screen you want may be labelled either BIOS or SETUP or BIOS SETUP, or rarely (I think) SETTINGS.

Your Win98 installation disk(s) should be "bootable" and if you insert either the CD or Disk 1 of a floppy set in the appropriate drive and boot with the disk present it should boot from the disk, which may give you different startup messages.

You can also create a "Boot Floppy" from files on your computer. One source of instructions for doing this is at Building a Fresh New Win98 Machine. There's a lot more information than you need there, so you'll have to read through to find the "Making A Setup Disk" and adjacent stuff. Even here, the article can't tell you how to get into SETUP since that varies with each machine. The instructions here do tell you what files have to be on the disk to allow you to access the CD drive (especially mscdx.exe).

Since settings in the BIOS can suppress both the beep codes and the boot messages, using a different boot disk probably won't do anything different than what you see booting from your hard drive, but as a last resort it may be worth trying.

The files listed for the boot/setup disk will NOT allow you to use DVD functions of a combo drive. For that you need a driver specific to your DVD/CD drive, which may install in place of or in addition to the default windows CD driver mscdx.exe.

The Google search that I did (see above) appears to return at least some "user blog" sites where you may find people still using (and discussing) Win98 – and even Win95. If you troll around a few of them and can find one that looks reasonably friendly, posting a question where there's a higher knowledge density relative to Win98 may be more helpful than here.

Be aware though, that just like here sometimes people say more than they really know – i.e. if advice doesn't' sound reasonable don't do it. I'd also recomment that you DON'T click on the numerous sidebar adds you're likely to see for "Fix any Problem" etc, without doing some serious checking on the sources.

John