no operating system

Chris:
This is one strange cat you've got by the tail. My guess is you've got the system set so it boots the HD first and apparently there is no OS installed on the drive. take your hard drive, connect it to another computer and install an OS on it. Then connect the drive to your computer and make sure it will be the first drive to boot at system startup by setting the boot device order in the system BIOS.
before I forget, make sure you set the drive as MASTER and not as a slave.

Good Luck.

What OS are you running? I found similar problems with trying to load Win98 on pre-1998 systems. Or, on hdd that are larger than 8 GB. To resolve this, flash the BIOS. Find the make and model of your motherboard(will appear sceen at startup) andsee if the manufacturer has an update. Also, on the boot drive, put it on IDE 1. If it is the only ide device on that cable, set the jumper to the manufacturer default. I have jumpered a drive as a master and only had one device on the cable and it has not work. Set the settings for IDE connections in the BIOS to auto also. This may give you some things to look at.

Had similar issue with a Compaq - Try to install DOS and then windows or use a boot disk and install windows, let is install as a 2.1G and then use Partition Magic to adjust real HD size. If you have access to Norton ghost, create an image and copyit to a CD, as well as make the CD bootable - Completely installing windows and tweaking it to personal liking is about 3 or more hours, recovering a Norton Image about 15 minutes - go figure.

Boot the machine with a start up floppy type fdisk at the command line enter 4 and check to see if the master hard drive has been made active it should have a small "a" in the second column
If not press "esc" and select "2" I think to set the active partition
Good Luck
Baz

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