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I have a lot of machines of this era.. 40MHz 486's and early Pentiums..60's and 90's.
No boot media present? It's very often because the bios does not support booting from CD and has lost the HDD settings.
As it's successfully passing the POST it should be salvagable for next to nothing. The first thing to do is open the case and check the drive physically, cables and such.. Also check how the IDE cables connect to the board.. Do they go straight to the motherboard, or are they in an ancient ISA card plugged into a slot? (that may need a driver, time to start panicking.. lol) Whichever pull the drive out and with it all connected power it up. Does it spin up? and HDD light activity?
If not then it's probably a gonner, but if it spins and isn't going "tick..tick..tick" then there's hope for it.
Get into the bios settings.. usually delete/backspace or F2 with these antiques.. navigate across to HDD AUTODETECT and see if the bios finds anything on primary or secondary.. If it has found the drive select the set of numbers with (Y) in them..save and exit. There is a small chance the system will boot with no further assistance, otherwise you may need to change the boot sequence.
If you found nothing with auto detect (it doesn't always work) you will probably have to add the info manually. A lot of these old drives have a set of numbers on them.. cyls/sect/heads.. in the part of the bios where you set time and date you can add these numbers.. primary master is the one (check the jumper on the drive, and set it to master with the CD drive set to slave on the same cable) Again save and exit.
If that doesn't do it you need to get a salvage drive from somewhere.. Most repair shops will give you small old drives.. a couple of gigs.. they aren't worth anything to them. You will be saving them the trouble of binning it! I get given boxes of them from time to time, and most work, or can be got to work after a fashion.
Find out if your machine will boot from CD and post again after trying some tinkering with the bios settings.
Retro is good.. I'm posting this from a 1995 Pentium 90 running puppy linux. It's HDD is a Maxtor 83240D3 dated 6/10/98 and still going strong.
This message has been edited since posting. Last time this message was edited on 23. January 2007 @ 18:33
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