pc not reading hard drive or cdrom..no partitions

I need help recovering from a major disaster.
What began with a virus (bugbear) ended (thru a series of blunders) with my old compaq presario 4880 being inoperable.
I tried to run the quick restore disk but it failed halfway thru the format sequence, leaving my system destroyed.

I deleted my partitions with FDISK in the DOS mode but I can't get FDISK to reinstall new partitions. It just tells me that there are no partitions to delete.
My OS is W98 and it has be upgraded to SE.
I can boot from an emergency boot disk but I only get an A prompt now and typing in other drive letters tells me they are invalid drive letters.

My pc is not reading my hard drive (C) or my CDROM
when I boot up using the quick restore recovery CD, it comes up initially but then tells me to insert the CD although I have it in the drive already.
I'm stumped!
Sherry