problems with no cd drive on rm board

I am currently building a router cum file/print/scanner server around an old rm laptop board and ClarkConnect. So far everything is going fine, including soldering a peice of ribbon cable onto the protruding pins on the back of the board to bypass the proprietary hard disk connector.
However, when I removed the onboard CD drive to make room for the CF card HDD (there is no room in the case I have built for both), i started to run into all sorts of errors with the boot up. The relevant text is here:
(whichever ide drive is plugged in)
ERROR
02B0: Diskette drive A error
press <F1> to resume, <F2> to setup

As the line listing the ide device disappears when it is not plugged in, I think it may be irrelevant.
pressing F1 resumes normal boot, although win95(which I have on an old hdd) complains about an 'invalid system disk' and refuses to boot. This happens even when both the fdd and the ide controller are disabled, and last in the boot order. ClarkConnect detects a mythical floppy and mounts it as fd0, whilst the BIOS shows it as a '3.5" floppy' in the hardware detect section.

I do not mind the mythical fdd as long as it doesn't try and mount itself, but what is really annoying, as this system is to be run headless, if the requirement to press f1 when booting. There is no 'halt on' option in the user-friendly BIOS, so I cannot simply disable halting.

Anyone got any ideas?

Strange... What was the make and model of the laptop?

It was an RM acy23-14 laptop (with codes like ng804 n30n3 w037579106 on it), but unlike the others i have it has a phoenix bios. As to what the actual board is I haven't a clue, and the RM number hardly helps!
I wonder, does bios stand for basic input and output system or built in operating system? In this case I think it's built in operating system!!
The specs are:
256mb of ram (128 mb on-board and a 128mb ddr stick)
a 1.0 GHz processor
via integrated graphics and sound
(if that helps)
If not, I may try compiling coreboot. Does anyone have any experience of this?

The output from dmidecode on another of these laptops:
BIOS information
Vender:Phoenix
Version: V1.60
release date: 04/12/2002
runtime size: 88256 bytes
rom size: 256 kB
hope that helps

You want to check to make sure coreboot will support this hardware if so then I would say go with that as it seams that the custom bios for this system is a bit funky. But what bios on a laptop is not funky lol. If I had not read what you have already tried to get it working then I would say to check the bios for anything regarding the boot sequence or something that says check for failures on floppy. But seeing as you have already tried this then your options for getting around this problem are limited. BTW BIOS stands for Basic Input and Output System. The bios job is to get the hardware to a state that is known so the operating system can take over.

I've just noticed that disabling the fdd controller causes an error on another of these laptops, even with the fdd in place. Bother!

You may wanna check the original manufacture web page and see if they released a newer bios for the system. Its possible they have resolved this issue. Or you can just enable the fdd controller and take it out of the boot sequence. This is of course it gives you an error unless a real fdd drive is connected.