R40 wont boot from CD Rom or Hard Disk

[maximumcanon]

recently bought a used R40 (selling my new t43 by the way) and when i got it it had windows already installed. changed BIOS to boot from the CD rom first and put in the Windows CD to do a clean install. Nothing. went straight to the HD and would load windows. i decided to get slick and take out the HDD and load windows on it using another machine. Nothing. The screen stays blank. i have altered every BIOS setting i can thin of but it wont boot from the CD-Rom. any ideas? anyone else have this happen? is there a BIOS setting that mandates the machine to boot from the HDD and not from a CD? i know it is reading the HDD because when i enable the HDD password it asks for it (as it did when placed in another thinkpad). could it be a bad CD Rom?