AST Ascentia VL Laptop. No Hard drive found on booting

I have an AST Ascentia VL Series laptop, Model No 503642-002.  On booting it states it cannot find operating system.

On entering Bios no HHD is shown, just CD Rom Drive.

I can see the A:/ and D:/ drives in DOS

I have been on the ARI website, and although I found the model featured it gave no info.

Any ideas how I can breath life back into the machine.  There is no valuable data involved

Thanks for the help.  

Brian