BleepingComputer.com: Dell Laptop hardware problem

I was given a Dell Latitude C600 laptop with a dead hard drive and now I'm trying to get the thing going. Here's what I'm seeing; when I got the unit I knew the hard drive was bad, so the first step was to replace the drive with a 60 GB hitachi drive. When I try a boot with a Linux live CD, or a Win 2K disk in the CD drive I get: message 1: "secondary hard drive 0 not found" followed by:message 2: "No boot sector on hard drive". Followed by two beeps. The BIOS are Phoenix Tech. version A09. No matter how I set the boot sequence I still get the same messages. So I thought the CD drive was bad, so I replaced it with a new one, but still get the same messages followed by two beeps. I've check the Phoenix beep code and can't find what two beeps mean. The BIOS sees the new hard drive and records it as 60GB. Also, there's no way to reset the BIOS to the default setting. Any ideas on this mystery? Thanks.

You have the CD player set as the first boot device, correct
You might want to change the CMOS battry underneath the keyboard, I believe
That will also return the BIOS to default settings
Stranger things have happened

thanks for the reply. I think you 're on to something there. I'll get a manual and battery for it then have a go at it.

I worked around the problem by formatting the hitachi drive with an adapter and hooked up to my desktop via usb. After the format I reinstalled it in the laptop and was able to install Ubuntu Linux. I've got it working but there's still issues to be worked on. It's my winter project so I'm in no big hurry. Thanks.