If you're getting disk boot failure then probably something is not right with the physical connection, the IDE cable or possibly the BIOS needs to be tweaked to recognize the hard drive. If there is more than one drive in the system make sure the one you are moving in is on the first IDE port so it's drive A, also make sure there are no conflicts if you have two drives in there ie make sure one is set as master by jumper and the other is set as slave. I think you can get disk boot error even if there is no disk at all, so start by checking the physical connections and jumpering of drives. The other thing that sometimes happens when moving drives around is that what was drive a becomes drive c for example, in that case you will get a kernel panic with message stating no root file system found. If this happens, then the other procedure I mentioned will work, booting from cdrom or floppy, loading the kernel from removable storage with the boot param root= pointing to the proper location of root file system (follow that with noinitrd ro) and then once booted you can rebuild the kernel and update the bootloader. What you are doing is definitely possible, I have done it many times, building an entire system on on PC then then moving the drive to a mobile system. -- Doug
