Mac Portable SadMac

I was hoping someone could point me in the right direction with this one... I recently picked up this beast at a local yard sale. The owner said it had been sitting in his attic for the past seven or eight years; when I powered it on, all I could get was the blinking question mark in a disk graphic, indicating that the machine couldn't find an operating system (I believe). After a few hours of net-research, I learned that the internal battery needed to be charged up before the hard drive (Conner 40M drive) would spin up. So, after charging for several hours, I tried again, only to be greeted almost immediately with the 'Sad Mac' icon and the following code below it: 0010 1B10 0000 1FFA A visit to Apple's Tech Info Library turned up an article on the codes (number 7748 for those interested), but was clearly meant as a general overview rather than to address specific failures. Once the internal battery charged, I could hear the whine of the Connor spinning up, but that's as far as it gets. /mpm