IBM Thinkpad boot issues

I got a free IBM thinkpad 570E from a friend of mine a few months ago, she said it worked fine until someone tried to fix it for her and since than it does nothing.The HD has no OS on it I wanted to try Linux since I've never used it before, the IBM boots to the BIOS but the arrows won't work to actually configure anything. I put the HD into my dell laptop and have tried loading the OS on it. I've tried using my dell HD in the IBM since it already has an OS but the IBM still won't boot to the HD like it doesn't even see it. The IBM has an ultrabase so it does have a CD and a Floppy drive. Sadly it won't boot from the CD drive either and I'm kind of at a loss. The IBM has a 12GB hard drive and 196096 kb of useable memory. Anyone can help?