How is the HD and CDROM connected in your Dell ? If they are master and slave (and not on seperate IDE channels then most likely the CF card cannot master to the cdrom like the original HD did....just a thought 😀
Also 4 months ago JADB had same issue in the Youtube comments. the reply: "RetroTech Chris 4 months ago said -
@JADB some folks have reported that happening. Does the CF card boot in the virtual machine? How big is the card? Maybe try a fdisk /mbr to see if that fixes it? "

8GB CF card does boot in virtual machine. Do I still need a fdisk /mbr?

Laptop has only one modular bay, it can hold either a floppy drive or dvd drive.

Did this laptop ever boot proper from an HD while you have had it ? What did you use to make the Windows floppies and do they boot on that computer ?
Sounds like an issue with the Dell but hard to tell since you have not given any history of it. Oh and those Win9x boot floppies expect a CDROM, that is what they are for: boot from floppy to read a cdrom for install.
You can edit the config.sys on them and rem out the cdrom drivers as a boot test since DOS boots to see if the Win9x disks work ok on the Dell .

Laptop was a free giveaway. I have no knowledge of it's history. I've purchased a used 60GB 2.5" HDD from ebay to try. When I try to boot from Win98SE CDROM, it also only give me a blinking cursor.

I made the boot disks from a WIN NT4 desktop. The boots disks work fine on that desktop.

Installed a 40GB IDE HDD and laptop doesn't detect it, HDD LED on laptop doesn't even light up. 40GB HDD is 5V 0.6A, tested fine on Windows 7 desktop. This laptop shipped with a 6GB HDD back then. Did it use a different power rating?

Finally got it to work with a 4GB CF card. It didn't work with a 8GB industrial CF card.

Is there a button cell battery I can replace in old laptops that keeps time?

digicube wrote on 2022-08-07, 02:41:

Is there a button cell battery I can replace in old laptops that keeps time?

Yes, under palmrest - 7,2V. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=btp2pd6Rn8w