Operating system missing on old PC

I have an old Pentium 1 PC that I have not used for decades.  It’s got Windows 98 installed and this morning I switched it on as I needed to refer to some emails messages that I had received and replied to more than 15 years ago.  At the time, my emails accounts (both IMAP and POP) were all configured on Outlook Express.

However, for some reason, the PC is not booting and instead I get an error message saying “Operating system Missing”.

Can someone please advise me what I need to do?  It is not only the email messages of two POP accounts that I need to access but also certain Word documents.

I’ve tried re-installing Windows 98 but in vain.  The installation disk does not appear to spin at all when it is inserted in the CD player.  I even put the hard drive in an external IDE drive enclosure and connected the enclosure to a USB port on my Windows 10 PC but nothing happens.  The drive in the enclosure is not even recognized.

Can someone please help?  Thanks.

Sounds like the hard drive is dead. Nothing you can really do about it unfortunately.

Boot to BIOS Setup. Does the hard drive show up there? I suspect it does not.

Thanks for the response.  No, the hard drive does not even show up in bios.  The hard drive is surely dead.  But is there any free data recovery software program that can recover email messages?

Not possible unless you can access the  hard drive which you can't do unless it can be seen by an operating system.

If this is critical you can spend $1500 or more (probably more) and send the drive to a data recovery firm. They will remount the drive platters in another physical drive and may be able to get to it that way. I'ts expensive, requiring a clean room and some pretty expensive equipment. Unless it's some kind of mission critical data not worth looking into.