m101z boot failure

So my brother got this laptop (insprion m101z/1120) over two years ago. In the first year it started bsod'ing and he sent it to dell and they setup some special boot sequence and it seemed to work ok. Several months ago I installed an ssd (ocz vertex) to give it a boost and everything was fine, but I think I reverted the boot sequence back to factory. A couple months ago the trackpad stopped working. I disassembled to see if a cable was off and had to tape down the foil linking the trackpad to the power lights so it would turn on. Now, it turns on, but no drive is detected (fixed HDD = none) AND it will not boot from a bootable external cd drive or thumb drive in any of the ports. I stuck the SSD in another computer and it functions correctly so please don't tell me it's the drive, since the usb ports should still work as well. I know this must be some issue with the kludge bios they have on here. HELP!

 

Is there a way to reset the BIOS to the factory settings? If you can do that and there is still no fixed HDD detected, then you might have a bad motherboard. You should try a different working drive just to verify, though.

 

Thanks, yeah that's a good idea. Not sure I can find anything in the manual though.