BleepingComputer.com: Dell Inspiron 1720 Boot problem

Alright... here goes... I am trying to fix my brother-in-law's Dell Inspiron 1720 Laptop. He accidentally spilt water into it. And it wouldn't power on. I took everything apart and blew it dry. and I got it to where it will power on but not start up Windows. I also took out the harddrive and put it into my desktop to see if it was okay. It is fine, It starts up by itself and runs no problem. Once I put it back into the laptop, It finally got to the point where the Windows OS was loading. But, it would keep freezing on that screen. So, I took the HDD back out played around with a few things and when I put it back in, and now I can't get the OS to load at all again. Also, I am having a problem getting into the Bios. Before, It was a 50-50 shot of letting me into the bios. The Laptop would load all the way through the dell screen and go to a black screen with a blinking underscore. I want to try to go into the bios and set it to boot from the secondary HDD slot and just move the HDD over, cuz the first HDD slot may have gotten messed up with the water. The only problem is, now it wont let me get into the bios. Any ideas on how to get into the bios? I tried unplugging the battery and bios-battery to see if it would recognize the new setting, cuz thats how I was getting into the bios before, But now it wont let me into the bios at all. I also forgot to say that the laptop has Windows Vista-32bit.

Thanks,
Mike

P.S. Now after the dell screen loads, It goes to a black screen that says, Invalid configuration information - please run SETUP program.

Its not picking up the re-install disk either. IDK whats going on, Yet the HDD is fine because it starts right up by itself on my desktop.