Hi. Forgive me if this seems too obvious, but, when you F-Disked the HDD, did you put a new primary partition on the disk and make it the active partition?

I have only ever worked with a very small number of IBM 486 Think Pads, and I found them quite annoying - too much proprietary nonsense and the Lego-like nature of their construction required constant reassembly. The IBM versions of the OSs that came with these machines reflected IBM's proprietary eccentricities. I don't know if this is a problem with their Pentium machines or not, but you might be more successful if you had the OS that shipped with the machine or an upgrade for the machine, but then maybe not - who knows?