Help with laptop & new HD "System Disk Error..."

[NaughtyusMaximus]

I've inherrited my dad's old laptop, a TI Extensa 570CD (listed on Acer's site). The reason he gave it to me was because the hard drive had failed. I RMA'd it, and the new drive came in today. Since this laptop can only boot to disk, and a CD cannot be in the computer at the same time as the floppy, I used an adapter, and loaded Win98SE onto the drive from my desktop computer. The drive is perfectly functional.

I transferred the drive back into the laptop, and upon bootup (with NO floppy in the drive), I get a non system disk error. I throughly checked the BIOS for any errors, as well as upgrading it to the latest version and still have the problem. I know that the drive itself DOES work in the computer, as if I boot from floppy, I can access all the files that were loaded on with the windows install. No matter what I do though, I can't get the computer to boot from the drive.

 

[Pederv]

Tried sys a: c: ?
I have to work on laptops that can't have the floppy and the cd in at the same time. What I do is:
Booting from a win98 setup disk.
Fdisk and format c:/s the laptop hard drive.
Create a directory and copy the drivers for the cdrom(oakcdrom.sys), mscdex.exe and himem.sys into it.
Create an autoexec and config, then restart with the cdrom in.
Here at work I copy the win98 directory off of the cd onto the hard drive and install from there.
To do that you need xcopy, to copy the directory.

 

[NaughtyusMaximus]

I'm trying that right now, I've got a feeling that I'll need help creating the autoexec and config.sys files though...

 

[NaughtyusMaximus]

format c: /s works.
I have no clue what to put in the autoexec.bat and config.sys files though.
If somebody knows how, directions would be greatly appreciated.