New hard drive, created partition CD, but disc not recognized by system on boot up

I replaced my hard drive.  Acer support sent me recovery CD's and advised me to create a new drive partition CD as follows:

 Manish Tiwari: Once the hard drive is formatted, please perform recovery with the disc it will work fine.
 brad davis: With that disc 
 brad davis: first
 Manish Tiwari: That's correct. You need to format the hard drive.
 brad davis: basically that disc will be 'recognized' and will format the blank hardrive
 Manish Tiwari: Correct.
 brad davis: great
 Manish Tiwari: Sure.
 Manish Tiwari: Here is the link to download ISO image.
 Manish Tiwari:  http://support.acer.com/acerpanam/desktop/0000/Acer/VeritonL410/VeritonL410faq6.shtml

So, I downloaded the file, unzipped with winzip, copied to a CD. 

I place CD in external CD drive, turn on computer with blank hard drive, yet never reads the CD drive.  I've tried hitting F10, F12 at start-up, putting the CD back in after started, etc.

This is btw an EM250, but is exactly like an Acer Aspire - same KAV60 system with same parts. I even was speaking with Acer support.  

PLEASE HELP ME SIMPLY GET A BLANK HARD DRIVE GOING!  I HAVE RECOVERY CD'S READY TO INSTALL BUT FIRST MOST FORMAT HARD DRIVE!

Great idea, but will not enter BIOS without proper hard drive.  so what I could do is swap the blank hard drive with my OTHER fully functional identical EM250.  But first I would change the bios to first boot the CD.  To repeat - i would first change BIOS in other computer to boot CD, pull it's hard drive, put in blank one, and see if will then partition the blank CD. 

IF I THEN PUT MY REGULAR WORKING HARD DRIVE BACK INTO MY WORKING COMPUTER - WILL IT BOOT UP NOW THAT THE BIOS HAVE BEEN CHANGED TO FIRST BOOT CD?  IT NORMALLY DOESN'T HAVE A CD DRIVE - IT'S A NETBOOK??

IS THERE SOME OTHER WAY TO DO THIS.  

I DID DROP IN MY WORKING HARD DRIVE INTO THE NEW COMPUTER (THAT DOESN'T HAVE A DRIVE) AND IT BOOTED FINE, UNTIL THE CURSOR FROZE AT FINAL STAGE BOOT UP.    I ASSUME THAT HAD TO DO WITH PRODUCT KEYS NOT MATCHING ....

The solution found:   Keyboard ribbon wasn't attached correctly , that is why had no key board response to get to bios.