what can i do with a 486?

[David King]

>> It seems to be that the motherboard probably does not support booting
>> from cd as was common with older systems. A side note, I got the same
>> error on a p4 board yesterday because there was not boot device (bad
>> mbr). I would try a boot floppy to get the system to access the cd- 
>> rom
>> or install freebsd on the hard drive from another machine and swap it
>> to the 486.
> I don't have a CD-ROM drive on the 486. That is exactly what I have  
> tried. I've put the HDD in another machine, installed FreeBSD,  
> moved the HDD, then tried to boot. I've even tried 2 "standard"  
> MBRs. Try a boot manager? Nah..

Can you see the hard drive if you boot from a floppy?

Is the hard drive in the boot path in the BIOS? Are you using a 40- 
pin cable for an EIDE drive? It sounds like you can't see the drive  
at all