I have the same laptop and the Conner drive is dead in mine. Although I’m trying to use a sdcard. Have you had a look at the bios?
It only supports 47 hard drive layouts.
Maybe your new drive has different parameters than the Conner?

Edit realized there is up to 47 types

Edit 2
I’m a similar situation trying to boot from hard drive results in a blinking cursor.
Tried 2 different cards, type 4 and type 40
The partitions seem to come out ok but scandisk finds issues and creates recovered file’s chunks
I can read c: contents

Before installing the Toshiba HDD, I spent some time calculating the HDD CHS which was a pain in the butt. I can also read the C: drive contents once I use a boot floppy to start DOS. I'm starting to think the laptop might just be configured a certain way. Plus it only has 47 hard drive layouts so I'm assuming it has to be an exact match to work. I wish you luck with the SD card as I have had some bad luck getting those to work in MS-DOS era laptops.

Just a quick update, I went out a limb and tried something fun. I took a 120 MB HDD out of storage and installed it in another MS-DOS era laptop. I put DOS 6.22 on it and then installed it into the Mitac laptop. So now, the laptop boots just fine. I'm thinking the original 60 MB HDD might have had some issues as I tried installing DOS 6.22 again on another laptop and the drive wouldn't initialize properly. So I guess this fun journey is over for now...

Yeah I’m going to try a compact flash.
I could also try some older large disks

Do you have or know anything about the memory card? I’m also thinking if it’s possible to solder in some sim drams to the open spot on the board

Update on my progress booting worked with both disk overlay on-track and ex drive booted a 2 go cf card. The ontrack partition did not mount but the ez drive did on modern Linux pc.
I think the sdcard adapter likely will work with the ddo. I might try again sometime as it would ideal to run a cable ext to the battery compartment.
I’ve also been running power through the battery terminals. I’m using an adjustable power brick at 7 v. The brick is rated for 3 A. The laptop was drawing about 1.8 A on a bench supply with no hard drive.

Just picked up one of the cool machines. Has a 64MB CF card setup as Type 45. Anyone had any luck getting a larger capacity storage setup?

Sheedos wrote on 2023-12-08, 06:24:

Just picked up one of the cool machines. Has a 64MB CF card setup as Type 45. Anyone had any luck getting a larger capacity storage setup?

the answer is my reply right above yours. EZ disk overlay and im using a 1 GB compact flash card.

Thanks, I missed it in my excitement at obtaining this machine. Going to put in a new CMOS battery and look at main battery replacement options as well.

if you find a replacement for the cmos battery id be interested in a link. Do you have a memory card?

My local Jaycar store has a pretty similar one for the CMOS replacement:

https://www.jaycar.com.au/3-6v-aa-lithium-bat … nipple/p/SB1774

Looks like 1MB of extended memory is installed.

thanks for the link based on that i could also find something local.
yeah the laptop has 2 mb soldered on the motherboard, but i has a memory slot on the bottom left (looks like a pcmcia card slot)

Checked it, nothing there.

Found an ad in Byte Magazine from September 1991 (page 134, Internet Archive) that says the machine is able to have up to 8MB memory. Have you got the user manual handy for more tidbits of information?

no i dont have any documents about it (there might have a been an article in german, but its a little hazy if it was this laptop)
also i dont think the OP had one but mine also has the 387 fpu on the bottom the of the motherboard.

Sheedos wrote on 2023-12-08, 06:24:

Just picked up one of the cool machines. Has a 64MB CF card setup as Type 45. Anyone had any luck getting a larger capacity storage setup?

There’s been another one listed on eBay today with the standard specs. Seller doesn’t do international shipping though.