Laptop Asus X5DC(2010) can’t boot no more after formatting win 7 main disk

This laptop had win 7 installed and I decided to install a light Linux distro since it’s quite old and slow. I tried a couple distro but they where really slow in every task (even opening the drawer or a folder) so I kept trying new distro since in a certain point of time in the past months (it’s like months that i try to fix this laptop and I tried every trick in the book since I troubleshoot often) i couldn’t no more boot properly any os’s at all.

The installation process from a bootable stick always work but when I reach the “remove the bootable medium and press enter” prompt the pc reboots and the only bootable medium is network. If I enter the boot menu with “esc” key and select the hdd it always says “insert a proper boot media and press enter”.

The bios of this machine is super limited, can’t chose between legacy/uefi or ahci/ide etc..
I tried everything, even flash the newest bios available (minor change), tried to install os’s through an usb-sata adapter because I read that that a dead disk controller could be the cause of this behavior but with no success. I tried another disk even. The one time i tried to install windows xp i got this error: “setupldr couldn’t open drive multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)”

I don’t really know what to try at this point; an old man gave me this pc to make it a little faster and in years of doing this minor works with pc’s I have never been stuck for so long and i feel bad for this man. He can’t afford a new one and i would like to fix this one instead of throwing it from the window.

Edit:
Specs are:

• Processor: Intel Celeron 220 1 x 1.2 GHz
• Graphics adapter: ATI Radeon HD 3200
• Display: 15.60 inch 16:9, 1366 x 768 pixel
• HDD: 320GB sata
• RAM: 4 gigs