stumped-need help please

I have an older computer, it is a pentium 60 with about 24mb of ram. I formated the harddrive which had windows 3.11 on it. When i turn it on now, it says:

'Non-System disk or disk error
Replave and press any key when ready'

I am trying to boot from the floppy drive. I've tried many bootable disk with no lukc for any of them. I've tried anohter floppy drive too with no luck. I have the sequence boot a: then c:
I put the hard drive in another computer which had a hard drive with win98 on it also. When i booted it up, it said the non-system disk thing. The thing with that is i don't think i had either drive set to slave drive. Any and every ideas are greatly appreciated. Thank you

did you set an active partition after you formatted?

No, how do i set an active partition?

Formatting won't stop the partition from being active, and even if it did it wouldn't stop it booting from a floppy. You can boot from a floppy even with no hard drives attached.

yes i know, any ideas on why it won't boot from a floppy then?

tuck's right - unless you changed it the partition info should stay, so forget that.

it sounds like there is some IDE related problem since both your HDD and FDD aren't working (or being detected). double check all your cables and power cords, then try another floppy drive and cable that you know are working. that might help isolate the problem.

was everything working before you formatted? if so, that is pretty weird. does the floppy LED come on?