I am somewhat new to linux. I received as a birthday present a toshiba protege 300ct and really want to put puppylinux(small yet robust distro) on it. It has a pentium 133 with 64mb ram and a 2 gig hd. When I received it the harddrive had been formatted and when the system is turned on it says to insert system disk. (no floppy drive and no cd drive) the BIOS recognizes the HD. Oh yeah it has a USB port but booting from USB is not an option from BIOS only HD/FDD/CD options available. So my idea was to I put the HD in another system, install puppy and put it back? That should work right.

I guess the answer to my own question is . . . NO . . . I took the harddrive out of the laptop set it up as the only harddrive on another system installed puppy on the hard drive w/ grub in MBR and upon reboot it ran like a charm. So I excitedly placed the drive back in the laptop booted that bad boy up and after five minutes got the dreaded insert system disk and press any key to reboot. msg. Here is what I've learned and what I've done in order for the drive to be recognized and work with the BIOS on the laptop it must have a FAT 16 partion (NO LBA) so in CFDISK in setup the following
hdc1 250mb fat16 <32
hdc2 1389mb linux ext2
hdc3 361 linux swap

I wrote the partition table with those parameters installed puppy to hdc2 with grub to MBR removed the cd rebooted and grub came up I chose linux and puppy did it's thing. I then removed the harddrive from the desktop system put it in the laptop and you know the rest from above. I am very flustered right now I've been working on this for 2 weeks anybody have any ideas