I can't make the laptop boot from the hdd

i just bought a new 160 gb ide/ata hard drive for my laptop evo N610C compaq

now i don't have a dvd drive so i'm using an ext. one

after i replaced the old 30 gb hdd with the new one, used fdisk to put new partition and formated it fat32 (with large disk sep.)

i start the winnt from the i386 dir with smartdrv
(i boot my comp with 98 se with drivers from panasonic usbcd.sys and usbaspi.sys through them i get the ext. dvd through the usb)
and from here on just problems

i can't make the laptop boot from the hdd (160 gb) even when i install sys files on it

either the install finishes i am prompt for restart and then it just gets stuck after restart and shows me ( _ ) in the left up. corner of the screen

or it gets stuck in the middle of the file copying

help anybody couse i'm tierd of replacing the trey on those hdd