You had a 40MB hd with a 286! That must have cost an absolute fortune. My 40MB drive which came with my 486 must have cost over £150.
Having to edit autoexec.bat and config.sys to extract just the little bit extra base/extended memory to play a particular game. It was an achievement to do so.
And setting all the IRQs for any ISA or even newer PCI cards!
This is the IIRC 20MB drive on my first PC ( http://www.aten-hosted.com/images/DSC00078S.jpg ) and that cost an absolute fortune at the time 286 with 2MB RAM and 800x600 full colour monitor was like 3 grand at the time. Was shared with family though - my first personal PC came later.