Northgate laptop

Question

working on a northgate laptop for a friend. Windows will start up but i am getting the blue screen telling me to run "check dsk" but thats as far as i can get. replace hard drive from a know working laptop to see if it will boot up, no go. I try bootim from cd rom with os and keeping the message "non bootable cd" and i know the os cd is good. any help will be appreciateed.