Very odd: Computer won't load up properly..

Hey everyone.

A friend of mine has an old Windows 98; at startup, you get the usual, black screen, and all that loading output etc.. Now, what is happening, is it gets to a stage, where it says something like this:

Searching for boot record on floppy..Cannot locate   <-- "Cannot locate": I think it's something different, but similar meaning.
Searching for boot record on IDE-0..OK

Then, it stops there... it doens't go any further!!

I put the 3.5 inch recovery disk into the drive, and tried restoring the HDD.. it seems to do it okay, but then when I reboot again, the exact same thing it happening... I've gone through the BIOS a bit, but it all looks okay to me (lol - but what would I know? :P).

Any ideas anyone?

Kind Regards;