It's not the CMOS battery as in a basic mode on the IBM's (e.g clear'd CMOS) the IDE drive would be autodetected.

Did you have a bootable floppy you can put in? With this in, do you see a C: drive (is your Win2K drive formatted FAT or NTFS)??

Worst case, did you get a recovery CD from IBM. Will the system boot with that (even if you don't try to recover...) This would at least let you know if the hard drive is dead or something else is wrong.

I'm assuming this may still be under warranty by the way??