OK. I was sick the last few days so I couldn't try out your advice.
However, today I did...and not having much luck!
So, here is what I do:
1. Boot up TC from the CD
2. Since usbinstall didn't quite work for me, I followed the TC installation procedure to install it to sda1 (instead of hda1)
3. configured grub using root (hd1,0), setup (hd1)
4. changed the kernel parameter in menu.lst to include ide_core.nodma=0.0
5. Now, I have an app called wdog that I copied to /mnt/sda1/tce
6. Edited onboot.lst /mnt/sda1/tce to include wdog
I took the CF card out of my laptop, put it into the embedded device and although it booted up successfully, after about 30secs it died. The reason it died is because the wdog application failed to be executed - so the device's watchdog kicked in.
Is there something I am missing or doing wrong? Please let me know...thanks.