I am totally stuck here...

I cannot get this system to boot from any device I try. The original IBM 344mb drive had a corrupted Win95 install but would at least load and attempt to run, locking up after Windows started with Explorer crashing. Using an 40 to 44 pin adaptor on a desktop Win98 PII, I copied the contents of the Win95 CD to the IBM drive and reinstalled it in the Compaq. Even though I made no changes to the file structure, the system now errors out at boot with "Non-System Disk...".

If I had a working floppy to boot from, none of this would be an issue as I have all the Compaq setup and partition floppies. Problem is, since I've owned it, the floppy disk controller errors out with 601 - and - the floppy drive (Citizen W1D) is mechanically poor. With this new HD issue, I attempted to temporarily hook up an 34 pin floppy with a 26 to 34 pin adapter. However I couldn't get that to work, even rewiring as a Shugart so no doubt the on board controller has issues.

I've since tried another 40 pin drive (Seagate) and several configured, working CF cards. However, all of these setups result in "Disk Controller Error" which is understandable, since the CMOS still has the original IBM drive specs loaded.

But what really baffles me is why the IBM drive now refuses to boot, always erroring with "Non-System Disk...". I've since given up and deleted/created new partitions on it, cleared the MBR and tried numerous MS-DOS versions but still no change.

Does anyone have any other ways that I can try to get around this?