Can't get a Presario 1200 to boot from floppy CD or hard drive.

Hello Everyone,
A co-worker asked me to take a look at at their Presario 1200 because it
wasn't booting up anymore. They kept getting a message "Operating System not
found". I thought that it was a simple case of the operating system needing
to be re-installed. But to my frustration I am still unable to get this
system to boot properly. I have tried booting from CD, and floppy with no
success. I removed the hard drive and put it in another system to scan it for
errors and found nothing. I completly formatted the drive and put it back in
the laptop. I tried booting from a Windows XP installation disk and.....
nothing. I c reated a bootable floppy and still nothing. I keep getting the
same error message. It doesn't seem to matter how I setup the boot sequence
in the BIOS, the system doesn't even try to boot from the floppy or CD.

Is there something I'm missing here? Is there a known issue with the Compaq
Presario 1200 series that I should know about? For the sake of my sanity (and
my pride) any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks

Craig