Alright, I've just installed 3.9 on my laptop hard drive from my pc (gotta love adapters), as my laptop has no cd rom, and I'm simply not skillful enough to pull off a network install.
I ran the installer (with "beginner", since I'm planning to run this on my poorly documented, somewhat customized toughbook), got my drive partitioned, it copied all of the files, everything seems fine, and I reboot (still on the pc)- successfully.
Everything but the sound card is found, all fine. I finish reconfiguring what I think pertinent, and put the few drivers that I know I'll need on the drive.

I've now put the laptop hard drive back in the laptop, and it is giving me an error that there is no os found.

For the record, this is a _very_ old panasonic toughbook cf-25 mk3, with some further customizations.
The installer forced me to format to reiserfs (gah), instead of allowing me to use ext2/3 as I'd originally created, and grub went to the mbr rather than boot partition (how does this change matters either way?)

So I'm at square one, I'm not familiar with reiserfs compatibility, or if the current installer is full functional, etc etc

Any insight into this problem, even if it's just to start chucking out what's not possible/likely to be at fault is appreciated.
This is my own personal project, and I'm willing to put the time and effort into it, but evidently my kung-fu is weak.