error message at restart and cant restore??

i have a dell laptop C400. my uncle has not used the laptop for 3 years because of viruses on it.
The laptop only has a external cdrom drive. He does not have the original restore disc for it.
2 days ago, for some reason he went into the BOIS settings, and now he is getting a message at restart

""No Bootable devices-- strike F1 to retry boot, F2 for setup utility"".

When you press F1, nothing happens just the same message comes up.

So now he gave it to me.
I only have an old restore disc of windows xp from a old gateway computer.
Should this work for the restore??

I tryed it and pressed F12 and selected to rebot from cdrom.
the screen goes black and then nothing happens.

What is wrong?
What should i check in the Bois settings?
Can you use a desktop gateway restore disc on a dell laptop?
Am i doing something wrong?
Is there anything else i should try?

thanks to all that hellp

 

A Gateway version won't work on a Dell and it is illegal, anyway.

Check the settings for the hard drive. See if it is set to "compatible", IDE, or some other setting and try all the possibilities.

If all else fails, try setting everything to default.

Try pressing F11 at boot time right after the logo. There may be a recovery partition on the drive to restore Windows.