Precision t5400 + no boot device

I recently acquired a nonworking precision t5400.  Basic troubleshooting indicated a bad hard drive.  I removed the hard drive, tested it on another machine and ran Seagate utility software on it and it was indeed bad.  I installed a new hard drive, and installed windows 7 on it.  It refused to boot.  Grumbled and complained, I have never liked Windows 7 all that well so I installed linux on it.  Wow, it ran well from the CD to check it out, installed flawlessly, updated from the internet and I was home free!  I removed the installation CD and it would not boot from the hard drive...again, no boot device found.  I thought it might be a bad sector in the boot section of the hard drive.  I took it to another machine, reformatted it and installed windoze 7.  I rebooted the machine several times and played a few games on it and the hard drive worked flawlessly.  When I reinstalled it in the T5400 I again got the dreaded ....no boot device found...    ???????????    What in the world am I missing?

I have the newest bios revision, A11.    The optical drive is a sata drive and will load an operating system just fine.  I can recognize and boot from a USB drive.  The BIOS recognizes the hard drive correctly, and I can access the hard drive and read or write files to it after I have booted from a CD or USB drive.  It just refuses to boot from the hard drive.   Any ideas?