Hey, so, my Ergo Pro x453 had an issue with its BIOS and this was fixed in another thread.
Help with BIOS behaviour, Fujitsu Ergo Pro x453

Now that's fixed, I decided to backup its 26 year old IDE hard drive (2gb), with Windows 98 installed, before cloning that onto a Compact Flash card (16gb)
So I can then use THAT as the boot device.

Issue 1
So, I used a Mac, with both the card and the drive attached with USB adapters.
Then I used the shell command dd, to clone the Drive onto the Card, taking care to do it right direction.
Then I ejected the Flash card and the IDE drive.

Next I plugged in the CF Flash, using an IDE adapter, and making sure It went in right orientation in terms of the socket
It has lights on its LEDs, but during boot, nothing.

So I plugged the original IDE drive back in, and... there is no boot on it now! Argh!

Does anyone have any experience with this process? Because I assumed that dd, being a backup command, would not write anything to the IDE drive
But appears that in the act of just mounting it on the Mac, that it has somehow borked the MBR or something esoteric

I want to keep the original Win98 install, as it has all the required drivers, and that's quite a lot of work to re-create with a fresh install.

So, that's issue 1.

Issue 2, is that I burned a Win98SE CD-Rom, and I used that when the IDE hard drive WAS booting into Win98, to install missing USB drivers, as oddly, it seemed these WERE missing
With the IDE Hard Disk drive not booting, it appears I need to use some kind of MSDOS tool to write its MBR, or analyse it etc.
I thought this was via a Boot floppy, but by Win98, it appears there was NOT boot floppy in tandem with the OS

Now, I insert the Win98SE install disk, and set the CD-Rom as the ONLY bootable device, and it does not boot from it.
So, I downloaded a Win98SE boot disk, a very small CD-Rom image, just 2mb, and I tried that, and it wont boot from it either.

Does this sound normal? I'm wondering if this machines BIOS has got corrupted again. I suppose I could flash it again.
But Id be interested to hear others views on this before pointing fingers

I DID get it to boot using Win95 install boot floppy last night. But when I tried to apply a new MBR to the hard disk
Well, it was not booting still, but I think there WAS a difference, but still, no boot.

Now, IF that Win98 install on the hard disk IS fried, which I hope not, then OK, I take it on the chin and move on.
problem is, right now, I don't have the ability to get the Win98 install disk to boot, so I have NO path to getting that re-installed, right?

Maybe all of the above is normal enough for these machines. But its certainly frustrating 😒