I've picked up this system as part of a large lot recently but this system in particular I was intending on passing onto someone.

Its giving me some grief in that it just plain refuses to auto detect its original hdd, or any hdd for that matter and if I manually enter the details (cylinders/heads/sectors) it also doesn't boot. FDISK just reports error accessing fixed disk. The machine boots fine from floppy but I cannot access the hdd.

One thing to note is that the dallas rtc is dead, could this be the reason I cannot get the hdd working?