HELP!!! Upgrading win 98 to XP

I am TRYING to upgrade Win 98 to XP. I got to the point where I rebooted and a screen which asks me to insert the XP Professional CD, which is already inserted, so I am assumming my computer is not recognizing my CDROM drive. So, I made a bootable disk and got to the point again where it asked me to insert the XP cd, so from this point I booted from the disk and ran winnt.exe. I then provided the location of I386, and continued. This time I got the message that smartdrive was not installed, BUT I proceeded with the installation anyway. It began copying files and seemed to work fine, but four hours later there was asolutely no progress……SO I cntrl+alt+del to stop the madness.

When I rebooted I was given the option to go to the previous operating system on C: or continue XP installation. I selected previous os and did the following:

modified the config.sys file to contain the line DEVICE=C:\WINDOWS\HIMEM.SYS….then saved and restarted the computer, and was again given the option to restart previous os OR continue XP…..A QUESITON HERE…is this version of my previous os not including changes that I’ve just made to my config.sys file?

In my previous os I copied the smartdrv.exe to my bootable disk and modified the autoexec.bak file to contain the line c:\windows\smartdrv.exe….then I saved and restarted the computer, booted with my disk and tried to execute smartdrv.exe………..but the message I STILL receive is “SMARTDRIVE cannot be loaded because the XMS driver, HIMEM.sys is not loaded. Check the CONFIG.SYS file for a device=himem.sys command line.”

MY QUESTIONS:
Why is my config.sys file not recognizing the line which points to the himem.sys file?
Do I need to add something to the himem.sys file?
Is there a file or a line that I am missing in order to set up smartdrv.exe?
Am I getting nowhere because I initially stopped the installation at a point which I should not have?
I realize that smartdrv won’t work until himem.sys is installed, but how do I do this correctly?

Please help!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

 

Do you have alot of information that you do not want to lose?
How much memory do you have and what kind of processor.
If your computer is having trouble installing xp then i would not recommend using it because it takes alot of memory to run.

If you have a good computer (256 MRAM, 400+mghz) then try to go ahead and install xp

If you have an older computer (less than that above) stick with 98

Personally if i were you i would reformat my hard drive and reinstall 98 and leave it at that.

But whatever you do good luck!

 

I was going to install more memory prior to the installation to get better performance from XP. Currently I have 128 MRAM and a 450mghtz processor.

I'm figuring installing more RAM won't really help at this point. And I'm clueless why I can't save the changes to the config.sys file. I feel as though after I get the smartdrv.exe to run, things might go more smoothly.

I would like to figure this out so I don't have to wipe out everything....but it might come to that point....