kamikaze tom > Well, like I said, I had tried that little trick already, but just not for that amount of time. The info I saw about it said 30 seconds should do it, so that's what I did. I went back and tried for at least 2 minutes like you suggested, and no change. Still dead as a doornail. Thanks for the suggestion though!
mairving > We thought about it being the power adaptor too. I didn't post that because I knew we were using a known-good one (it worked fine on another laptop, but on this one it has no effect). After doing quite a bit of Googling last night, I'm really starting to suspect the motherboard went belly up on this thing. There are numerous posts from people with this model that have had the same problem.....using it fine and then *poof* it goes dead. Pretty much every one that I read about turned out to be a bad motherboard, and since this thing's out of the warranty period, it'd be out of our pocket to buy one and I'm not sure if it's worth it if they go bad so quickly (one guy had his die 3 times in one year!). I ran across one of those adapters on Newegg last night (like you linked to), and that's probably the route we'll take with it.....data recovery then junk it. Kinda leery about using one of those things though.....I've heard several horror stories about people frying the drive with them. Hopefully that won't be the case with ours. Thanks for the reply!