D800 DOS Boot Partition

I am trying to get my Latitude D800 to boot to an MS-DOS partition and am failing mightily.  My system is a Dell D800 with Windows XP (SP1), internal 30GB hard drive and a 500GB external USB hard drive.

 

First, I re-partitioned the external hard drive.  I created a small (30 MB) partition.  Booted off a DOS floppy, formatted the hard disk with the /s option, and copied the required files to the partition.  I changed the BIOS to boot off the floppy, then an CD/DVD, then external USB device.  I removed booting off the internal hard drive.  (Just as a note, the external drive now has the small DOS partition, some blank space and a giant NTFS partition with no operating system.)  The system still booted Windows XP off the internal hard drive.  I eventually pulled the internal hard drive and receive a "No bootable devices" error.  I can boot off the floppy and see the hard drive partition I prepared with DOS.

 

OK, since that didn't work, I found another hard drive I could use in the D800.  I booted off the floppy, fdisk-ed to remove all partitions, added a slightly bigger DOS partition (80MB) and loaded the OS.  Changed the BIOS to re-allow booting from the internal hard drive.  This is the only partition on the drive.  Again, I receive a "No bootable devices."

 

In doing this, I upgraded my BIOS from A03 to A13 with no affect.  I cannot find a single method, beyond floppy, to boot the system in DOS.  Any help would be greatly appreciated.

 

Terry