won't boot

I'm having trouble with a friends computer, they told me it wouldn't boot. It's a generic PII 233, I have no idea what all is in it. From our conversation I figured the battery was dead and the bios had lost the hard drive settings. When I got there and got into the bios, sure enough the clock was at something like 00:01:23 and counting. So, we went and got a new battery and stuck it in and then I noticed it had auto seek and it was set to seek the primary hard drive first. It still won't boot. I know the bios settings all got reset, but it seems that with primary drive set to auto that it should boot up...even with a dead battery. Could someone please give me some pointers as what to look for? BTW, what it does is...it counts the memory and then says "cmos error...press F1 for setup or F2 to reset defaults and continue." If you press F2 it just says "wait..." and does nothing.

Thanks!!!
DR