Has anyone tried this trick?

[Lei Z]

Hi,

A while ago, I read somewhere on the web that, with an adapter, it's
possible to take out the laptop hard drive and put it into a desktop
machine. After installing OS('s) on it, put the hard drive back to the
laptop and generally things should work with some minor re-configurations
such as X.

I bought an Armada m300 (it came with no floppy or CD-ROM drive) from ebay
a few days ago. I tried various possibilities to get this to work.  When
the laptop hard disk was in the desktop, it worked flawlessly just like a
regular desktop hard disk with every OS I tested with including DOS, win
98, win2k (no chance to try FreeBSD yet). But after I put it back to the
laptop with installed OS, the partition was recognized and bootable only
when DOS was installed. When the primary partion was installed with win98,
or win2k, the disk is simply not bootable. Also, DOS extended partition is
not recognized in the laptop either. I created the primary partition under
DOS, during Windows 2000 installation, or under desktop's Windows XP
(laptop disk mounted as slave), but the results were mostly the same.

Is this a BIOS incompatibility, or something else? Has anybody got
successful experience with this trick? A quick search showed that Armada
m300 doesn't seem to have a special reserved partition like some other
laptops. Thanks for any hints, suggestions to get this work.

Leo