What is wrong with my Thinkcentre?

[Jawnskeel]

I've come to the conclusion that I hate these IBM thinkcentre workstation-type computers. Very low-end. It has a p4, 512mb ram, ide hard drive and cd drive. All is dandy when it works, it's slow, gets the job done. But a hard drive crapped out the other day, and I didn't back it up, so it's back to the drawing board. It took me forever to find a reasonably priced local IDE hard drive. I go to install a fresh copy of Windows onto it, and the darned thing will not boot from the CD drive. I'm pretty experienced with computers, so I've changed every setting I could in BIOS that had to do with drives or with booting. I've mad the CD drive the only drive it should try to boot from, yet it still will get past the splash screen and give me an error reading:

1962: No operating system found. Press F1 to repeat boot sequence.


I can't for the life of me get this darned computer to boot from the CD. Bootable USBs will also not work. It's bad enough I have to reinstall everything onto windows, but this thing is making it worse by not letting me install Windows itself.


Any help is greatly appreciated.

In case it helps, the BIOS says the computer is a thinkcentre 8183d7u.


Edit: updated BIOS to the latest revision, and it still will not heed my command to boot from the CD no matter what i try

 

[kmote]

Make sure that the CD drive is detected in the BIOS then reset the BIOS back to Failsafe Defaults. If that doesn't work, create a bootable CD from any image you can get hold of (Linux, memtest86+, whatever) and try to boot to that.