laptop blues

["Zachary Florian" <icthusianz@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

sorry about having two problems at once, but that kinda happens (refering to
my other message about a PBell comp) anyhow i have this NCR laptop
(486SL-33mHz, 12Meg RAM, 212 Meg HDD) that won't boot. well it will, kinda.
the BIOS will load, setup is able to run, but before the laptop will boot to
HDD it requires the Phoenix MISER partition... in fact it won't even boot to
a floppy without the MISER partition... now i know that the MISER partition
is a small partition that houses the RAM before the computer last shutdown
to make boot-up quicker, and i was wondering if anyone knows of a way to
escape the wonder that is the MISER partition needing to be there? might the
HDD be dead and that's why it won't boot? or is there possibly some other
hideous reason as to why it won't even boot to a floppy (no CD-ROM)

see i'd kinda like to make it a text-line computer and use something like
emacs to do word processing on the go as i really wouldn't use a laptop for
much more...

any help here would also be greatly appreciated...