No boot or BIOS

I have a friends Lenovo 3000 N200 laptop at the moment and she has been trying to download iTunes and a few other things and brought it to me because it was extremely slow and required a heap of updating on the iTunes she had already on the machine.
Now I have found the 160GB hard drive very low on space and have removed Google Chrome and some other stuff that she is not using any more. Further I found only 2GB RAM onboard which I guess is not helping matters.
I have also used a few of the tips from the optimizing tutorial to speed this machine up ie shortened the menu show time and hurry up the shut down. Have run CCleaner through it (1GB) temp files gone and managed to run some malware scans. The BIOS I noticed was set to boot from the optical drive and I reset it to boot from the hard drive.
The machine already began running a fair bit faster but on a restart I cannot even get the BIOS to show (F1) let alone the Vista.
The hard drive light comes on for a few seconds before the machine just "idles" with the power light showing.
Have tried removing the battery and trying for the BIOS, reseating the hard drive, but with no start up at all.

I am beginning to wonder if the CMOS battery might be dead or that I have set something wrong ie the menu show time.
Any ideas would be most welcome.

Does F2 bring up the temporary boot order? If so perhaps putting it back to Optical first is worth a try. There may be some funky timing issue. Maybe the HD isn't ready yet if it's at the top of the boot order.

MilesAhead said:

Does F2 bring up the temporary boot order? If so perhaps putting it back to Optical first is worth a try. There may be some funky timing issue. Maybe the HD isn't ready yet if it's at the top of the boot order.

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Yep Miles tried that mate and I don't know if it is because the drive is so full or something is getting hot but I left the machine off for three hours and just about to pack it up and hit the power and it booted.
It is still dreadfully slow and I think in for replacing in all honesty.
But thanks for the tip mate.:D

Yeah. If it's that full the HD probably took quite a beating.

Yes mate it took a bit of a thrashing I suppose cos I did remove 1GB of rot with CC and some programs she didn't know what they were for or even used. Anyway I she will have to update sometime soon either by shoving a new drive and 7 in this one or a new machine altogether.