I found my solution, wanted to post it here in case someone else 
encounters it.  I checked the FAQ first to make sure I didn't do another 
"duh" post again, LOL.

The image was made using an old NT 4.0 SP0 workstation using 
phydiskwrite.exe.  I thought maybe being an ancient build of NT 4.0 was 
the problem.  It actually wrote the image just fine, so that is ruled 
out.  The PC I was trying to boot with the IDE drive has a few BIOS 
settings for the drive.  Mainly the LBA disk mode needed to be turned 
off.  The drive disk geometry mode also had to be set to "Standard 
CHS".  Once this was set, the drive would boot m0n0wall properly with no 
issues.  This might only be an issue with really old computers like the 
one I was using.  I haven't had a more modern system to try this on yet, 
so this may not be an issue with newer PCs that you load m0n0wall onto.

Thanks,
Michael

KnightMB wrote:
> I have an old NEC computer, specs are PI - 75MHz, 64MB RAM, 1.2 GB 
> HDD, (2) Linksys 100TX NIC cards.
>
> The system doesn't support CD-ROM boot, so I took out the hard drive 
> and used the physdiskwrite.exe program  on another computer to write 
> the image to the drive.  Everything writes fine, I can even examine 
> the disk afterwards and see that it has created the partition 
> properly.  When I take the drive and install it back in the machine, 
> the system gets a "read error" while trying to boot the drive.  I took 
> a look at the drive in a raw mode and noticed nothing in place to 
> bootstrap the OS?  Is the generic-pc-1.21 image missing all the 
> bootstrap information?  I know the drive is good, I can install 
> Windows 98, Windows NT, even FreeBSD 4.11 and they all work fine.  
> What am I missing? Is there something more that needs to be done after 
> you load the image to make the hard drive bootable on the PC?
>
> Any help would be greatly appreciated.
>
> Thanks,
> Michael
>
>