I checked the boot sequence and other F12 and F2 options, looking for any indication that it recognizes a hard drive present. All it will recognize is the optical drive-CD/DVD.
Using the utility disk, I was able to load some drivers, in fact all that I could pull out of the disk, as it would not load by an .exe command. This manual extraction could easily miss something, and, as rebooting still did not recognize C: it was a failure.
Hard drive is invisible! Any specific method to checking the BIOS that I miss from F keys mentioned?