Can i fix my gateway astro?

okay i have this old gateway astro. it came with windows 98. a problem arose when i turned it on and it went to the start window where you put your name and pword to get to your profile. when i do that and click okay , the window dissapears and it just stays like that. the mouse moves but it never goes to my profile. it does the same when i click cancel to go to the default profile. so then i used the recovery cd and rebooted it. it still does the same thing. then what i ended up doing is deleting the win98 software. is there something wrong with the hardrive? it still works but theres no software. could i just get new software to put on it? or is there a way to completely erase every thing on the hardrive and start from scratch?