Beretta.net

My roommate has a 1995 Beretta with the 2.8 and 5spd transmission.  He was driving home the other day, shifted to neutral coming to a stop sign, went to put it in first gear and nothing happened.  In fact without depressing the clutch pedal you can shift it through all the gears and into reverse, none of the gears grind and I know for a fact that the clutch wasn't anywhere near worn out the day before this happened.  He said it didn't make any weird noises or do anything odd to make him suspect something but the shifter doesn't seem to shift the transmission anymore.  My dad is an ASE certified master tech so I know a good bit about cars from growing up and I'm a machinist by trade so I checked under the hood for the usual things, I did notice the top cable for the shifter linkage was missing the rubber insert but the hole size on the cable end and the stud on the shifter are both standard sizes, .625" (5/8") and .312" (5/16") respectively so I just turned a new bushing on my lathe and fixed the cable issue, but fixing the cable issue didn't affect any noticeable change in the problem at hand.  Has anyone got any idea what could possibly be causing this?  It's like the pressure plate isn't contacting the friction disc at all anymore, like somehow the slave cylinder failed in the extended position which seems about as likely as an airplane crashing in my yard since 999 times out of 1000 when a hydraulic system fails it loses pressure instead of maintaining it.  Any help or input at all would be greatly appreciated before I go out there and tear the transmission out of it to figure this out.  Thank you all.

Sounds like either the throwout bearing went bad or the clutch fork got bent. GL.

Can you tell if any power is being tranmitted into the transaxle? Can you audibly hear the gear being engaged?

I suck at the internet and it took me a while to figure out how to amend my post.  I can audibly hear the gears shifting in the transmission.  The other day I pulled it into the garage and pulled the shifting mechanism off the side of the transmission to make sure the little tooth that sticks down hadn't broken off, everything looked good at that particular juncture.  I've been talking about it with some old old mechanics and some said that since its a car with 90,000 miles and its never had a clutch put in it, and its been sitting a lot without being driven, what might have happened is all the friction material might have just fallen off the clutch.  Several people said that might be a possibility.  I plan on tearing that sucker out this week in my spare time and I'll be sure to keep this forum updated on what I find so that this mystery won't be such an enigma for future readers experiencing a problem of the same symptoms.