I then restarted by entering the restart command in dos and when the system reboots it starts to load from the disk drive and never stops it just keeps spinning and isnt doing anything with only a cursor displayed on the screen.
when you said this did you mean the cdrom drive or floppy drive, because I was going to ask you if your computer boots from cdrom to try the cdrom instead of the boot floppy. But if you already tried the cdrom then this won't help.
Also, have you tried not setting the partition active. I'm not sure that it has to be active, but it probably does. If you ever get it to boot remember that you still need to do a format c:.
Hope you get it to run, and sorry I couldn't help more.