There’s a couple of things to consider here.
First is a bad jumper setting.
Back then nothing was plug an play.
Second is an empty or outright dead hard drive.
Third is a botched firmware update on the hard disk controller card.
First grab a dos boot disk. If you don’t have one you can download
Dos or
CPM 3 by clicking the 3 button on this page.
Just create a bootable floppy with the correct loader (DOs or CPM)
From there you can verify if the drive is available.
CD C:/
Chkdsk
To find a trashed OS in need of zapping.
or
VD ^
CPM will look for the disk even if it’s not mounted or partitioned.
Then
format
For either
If no prior OS you can use the -q or q option to speed things along. If something is already on the disk don’t use q.
If that doesn’t work come on back and I’ll walk you through a quick physical test for drive health and then we will look at jumper settings. Again... this is an era where the A+ certification was necessitated. Everyone who worked on computers, certified or not, had a copy of the “Official A+ Training Manual” and most had the A+ bible as well. Setting jumpers was what it was all about.