Thinkcentre A50 won't boot from CD w/o HD

I can't boot from my hard drive, though all the files are there. I took out the disabled hard drive that wno't boot, and put in a replacement hard drive that as far as I know is not formatted, and I'm not able to boot from CD.

Both my Windows XP Pro install CD and my IBM recovery disk were booting up, regardless of which CD drive, when the hard drive that won't boot WAS there.

After talking to my brother in law, who says he constantly has this problem in IBM PC's at his sons' school, I took the hard drive out of the boot sequence, just the two CD drives are there and I've tried them both ways around.

It won't boot from the CD's.

It's Lenovo Thinkcentre A50, 8148D3U. The suport site says I'm supposed to have Bios 2CKT25A, and I have Bios 2CKT25Aus. which I think is a different way of putting the same number. It says that this version came out in Jan 2008. There isn't a newer version.

By the way, someone else posted the same problem on the Levono forum, and it's too recent to be John262 with the Thinkcentre M58e whose solution was updating to a new BIOS released in February of last year, and the support page mentioned that that update addressed that problem.

The CD drives are the one that came with the computer, and an AOpen.

 

Ok,

So does the CDROM still boot with the bad HD and not the new HD?

What type of drives are these SATA or IDE? IDE up top, SATA lower pane:

 

Hello,
Look at the last post in this thread. Maybe it will help.

Here is an explanation of HPA. Maybe the bios is looking for this area but because the new drive does not have one, it does not boot. Try to change HPA to disabled and see if will boot with the CD. Just a guess.