I am having trouble on startup and have been told to reload windows and that I will have to reformat my hard drive and partition it. I don't have a clue how to do it.

You may need a floppy disk to boot up the CD and format your hard drive, some versions of Windows didn't feature these options.

Not sure what the spec. of your PC is, but it may be worth your while looking into using Windows 2000 or XP instead.

Before you do anything
do you have the original W98 disc with the product key?

before you format etc, try reinstalling windows OVER itself, that can replace missing files which cause problems WITHOUT destroying data on the hdd