Question About Salvaging a Laptop

Hi, my friend gave me an Acer laptop that he had used for his job, it
no longer starts up. He said if I could get it working it is mine and
I wouldn't mine having an extra laptop. It is windows 98. When I turn
it on it says enter system diskette to reboot. I have no cd roms or
discs that came with the computer. I tried putting in the recovery cd
from my vaio windows xp, but after seemingly loading it up it says
microsoft permanent fatal error, system has to shut down,

So can this laptop be salvaged. I guess I would need a startup disk to
windows 98, but not even sure if that would do it. I am not that great
with computers, your help would be greatly appreciated.

The only thing I know is that it is an Acer model 1901

Sounds like the hard drive is not accessible (dead, bad or loose
cable).

When the system tries to boot up, it can't find an operating system
(which is on the hard drive) so it asks for a bootable disk. Try a
Windows 98/ME boot floppy - if you don't know how to make one, go to
bootdisk.com and download it. If you're more ambitious, you can
download the Knoppix live cd and boot from that. Then try to access
your C: drive to confirm that it is not accessible.

On an older laptop like this, I would expect to be able to hear the HD
trying to spin when you boot. If it's a dead HD, they are fairly
inexpensive to replace and usually not too hard (YMMV).

You can't use your Vaio XP recovery disc because it is an OEM version
of the operating system (OS) - OEMs are required to make sure that the
OS is not usable on any other mfr's machines.

http://www.acersupport.com/library/tm505ug.pdf for the user's manual.
Google is your friend :-)

PS, given the age, I wouldn't try putting XP on this machine unless you
maxed out the RAM (192MB) and made sure the processor met the minimum
for XP.

I'd stick with WIn9X/Win2000 or any flavor of Linux.