cannot get into BIOS

Hello Inspiron bios experts:

I cannot get F2 "enter setup" to work during startup.

System: Inspiron 8000.   OS win 2000.   
3yrs old.  2months past its warranty.
Configuration 2 hard drives.  

10G travelstar.  Located in left front bay using dell 9007C module.
60G Toshiba.  Data drive located in original right side tray.

 
When I added the second hard drive last year I
had to change the boot order so that it would
boot first from the 10G in the module bay.   I also added a bios password.

Everthing worked fine for a year and then last weekend - disaster.

I have been trying to troubleshoot this problem for the past week and have no luck.
Problem  … system stopped booting.  

System turns on.  Screen comes up with the dell
screen (press F2 to enter bios). 
Then it comes up with the bios password screen.  
I enter my password that I have been using for the
past year and it carries on booting but
immediately as it tries to read the hard drive
it halts on a black screen with flashing underscore.

I called dell, explained the situation. 
They said it would require a new motherboard. 
However my system is 2 months past its
warranty and he said that it would be
very expensive to replace.  

Nearly the cost of a new low end laptop.

He also gave me a different bios password to try. 
When I entered that different pw it removed my bios password.

Now my laptop starts to boots, the dell screen
comes up, then it goes directly to the
black screen with flashing underscore.  
(it doesn’t come up with the bios pw screen).

The major issue is I cannot get into BIOS !  Not with F2  or F12.   

Pressing it once or several times during start
up does not help. 

Attaching external keyboard doesn’t help either.

I took both HDs and tested them on a
desktop computer using an USB 2.0 enclosure.

It turns out that the 10G drive is dead.
This is probably the source of all of the problems.

I would like to find a way to get into the bios
setup to change the boot order so that I can
boot from CD and then reinstall system software onto my 60G hard drive.  

Note: my bios has never been updated so it has the
original bios that came with the system three years ago.

Yesterday I went and bought a replacement HD, Samsung 40G.
I formatted it using my desktop computer with the USB 2.0 enclosure.  

However I am not quite sure how to get a bootable
Window 2000 OS image for the inspiron 8000 installed on
the Samsung 40G using my desktop (an old Dell XPS T550).  

The windows 2000 setup program doesn't see the
new drive attached via the USB 2.0 external enclosure.

I tried cloning my XPS T550 C:\ drive onto the new Samsung HD
using ghost.

Is there a bootable image for the inspiron 8000
that I can download somewhere and copy to my new HD ?

I am hoping if I can get replace the dead hard drive
with a working hard drive my system might magically start to boot.    

No luck.   I installed the new samsung where in the left front
bay where I had 10G installed.  Exact same problem.  Flashing cursor on
a black screen that comes up a few seconds
after the dell screen (press f2 to enter setup) comes up.

If I try  ctrl-alt-d  during startup it does an
IDE test and correctly identifies both hard drives. 

The Toshiba 60G in the primary drive and  my new Samsung 40G as secondary IDE drive.
 
If I drive to boot without any drives I get
two messages.  Cannot find Primary drive.  Cannot find Optical drive.

As per some suggestion in the forum I tried
reseating the memory.  Doesn’t help.   For some reason system
just won’t let me into the BIOS!

It’s a catch 22 situation I can’t get into the
bios to change the boot order so that I can boot
from CD or floppy.   If I could boot from the CD-ROM I
could try to reinstall OS or even do a bios upgrade.

Any suggestions as to what else I can try before make
this laptop part of my computer museum collection along with
my zx 81 and apple IIC ?

Regards,

(guy thinking about buying a new laptop)

Sorry if this is a duplicate post.  I typed all of this
once before but I don't think it was properly saved to
the message board.