>> Date:    Mon, 23 Feb 2004 18:38:06 -0800
> From:    Diane Duncan <[log in to unmask]>
> Subject: No hard disk on cd boot Setup

Diane wrote---
> I've had a PII sitting here silent for about a year and every once in a
> while I get enthused to try to do stuff with it.

I think the sentence above is the key to your problem, your computer having
sat unused for a year has suffered from a loss of memory for the BIOS
causing it to loose all its settings.
The memory is held in CMOS by your CMOS battery which you can replace.
Once you replace your CMOS battery you will need to enter your BIOS and
proceed through the menus and reset everything.
You will first restore the default fail safe settings which should permit
you to successfully boot up, unless of course you are fortunate in having
written down all your settings and you can simply use your list to re-enter
all the original settings.
You will likely have an automatic hard drive detect setting which you will
want to use.
In the unlikely eventuality that your BIOS does not support auto detect of
your hard drive you would need to set the drive parameters manually which
another poster has correctly stated will be found on the drive itself.

 > I thought that if there's no hard disk, DOS wouldn't work, and DOS does
> appear on the monitor.  Anyway, isn't BIOS on the hard disk, and if I'm
> booting to BIOS, doesn't that mean there's a hard disk?

BIOS is stored by your CMOS which is held by a ROM chip, actually modern
CMOS is held by a EPROM chip (erasable programmable read only memory)
When you flash your BIOS to update it, it is the EPROM that gets rewritten.

Hope this helps.
Ron White

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