I am trying to replace a 3gig hard drive in an old fujitsu laptop with a new 40gig. When I booted up with a 98 boot disk and tried to sys c: it told me to partition for dos. I used fdisk (before reading up on it) and followed the default settings through the program. When finished it said to reboot for changes to be accepted. When I reboot with the startup disk in the a: drive it tries to load and then just spins. I don't get an a: prompt. If I boot without the startup disk I get the message "missing operating system".
Any ideas what I need to do?
I can still get into the BIOS but thats all.
Thanks

Is the "startup disk" the same as the "boot disk"? If not, try the boot disk again, and if it boots successfully, then fidsk again to a small partition size. Then see if the startup disk loads. What I am suggesting is that a 40 gig partition may be more than the software on the start up disk can manage. This is merely a guess, as you may imagine.

The fdisk (98 startup disk) just spins in the a: drive.
I tried a win98se boot dosk from bootdisk.com and I at least get a response "invalid system disk" replace disk and hit any key when ready

any other ideas?

Thanks

Here's a wild one, but you may find something more direct in the Windoes 9X forum..

The idea is: reinstall the 3 gig hard drive as the master drive, and make the 40 gig drive the slave. Boot up and see what you can see about the 40 gig drive, and whether you can fdisk it to a smaller partition.

Alternate idea: if the laptop does not have room for two drives, put the 40 gig drive in another pc as the slave, and see if you can fdisk it to a small partition, and them put it back in the laptop, and see what you see.

These ideas are based on complete ignorance of how that old bios views 40 gig drives. :-(