first post hope I'm in the right spot.

I have a a fujitsu b2131 laptop that I've messed up. had win98se on it, but was having issues after loading aol on it. I wanted a fresh start with Windows, but had no drives, floppy or cd-rom, to reload with. If it helps I do have a usb cdrom, but not much good out of the windows enviroment. I found this thread detailing how to install os with no drives. Before attempting these steps I made a backup of my drive using Norton's Ghost so I would have something to fall back on if I failed. I thought I followed the steps as described, but when attempting to start the laptop was greeted with the error "invalid system disk" I put the Laptop drive back in the desktop and boot from it. (worked fine into dos.) I redid the steps but only in so much as to install dos on the drive with same results. (I did a quick format in between tries.) I attempted to reinstall the the backup from norton's with the same result. I tried to putting just the formatted drive in to see if It would read a different message is said something to the effect of no os loaded. I tried going into the bios and having it redetect the drive. (Which it appeared to.)
Before one answers and says I must have a bad laptop or drive let me add that I have another laptop and drive that are identical that have met with the same results.
Let me step back to add the non technical questions for those that are interested.
My boss and I share identical laptops for work. He chose to install AOL on his though I told him it was a mistake. His laptop was not working correctly. So I planned to make a back up of mine using ghost and then restore it to his drive. The problem was that somewhere in the back of my mine I hosed the drive. That's when I conceived to reinstall windows on mine so that I could go with that. I did the steps as described, but met with failure. But I broke a pin off my Laptops drive somewhere in this process. I couldn't be certain when the drive was damaged. So I had no way of knowing if I had failed to follow the instructions or if the bad drive was to blame. So I took plunge and took the drive from the laptop. I successfully backed it up. (The difference was the first time I tried to do it across usb the second time I had a 2.5 to 3.5 adapter straight on the IDE.) Once it was backed up I formatted it and tried again. And failed. I have since tried everything as described above.
ANY HELP WOULD BE APPRECIATED AS MY BOSS WILL BE ASKING ABOUT THESE LAPTOPS SOONER THAN LATER>