I am not very well versed on pc's, but I'm
trying to figure this things out...

PC running windows 98
2 yrs old (My Favorite PC)
has cd and additional cdrw drive (added)
stopped booting - "disk boot failure"

I can boot from cdrw only. I managed to
get to "A" drive, typed in fdisk and the
message is "no fixed disks present"

Question: does this mean the hard drive
is belly-up??? or if not, what do I do? I
have checked all connections.

The first thing to try is entering the BIOS and try to auto-detect the hard drive. If the detection fails then you will have to open the case and check the power and data cable connections on the hard drive.

if that does not work then replace the cdrom cables with the harddrive cables and reverse them on the motherboard aswell so that you know which part might be failing. the motherbord, the cable or the harddrive.