The hard drive on my computer that I am on now crapped out on me and I tried to put it into my old computer (Sony VAIO) to see if the drive was dead. I disconnected one of the cd-roms in the VAIO and hooked my hard drive in. The computer would not boot. So I removed my hard drive and and reconnnected the cd-rom. I turned the computer back on and it (the Sony) would not boot. The BIOS doesn't even load. It just sits there with a black screen. I don't know what happened. I left it plugged in so that it would be grounded when I was working on it. I checked to be sure that all of the IDE cables were still plugged in properly and they are fine and I tried removing the battery to reset the BIOS but that did not work. I also removed the video card and put it back in thinking that may be the problem. Can you help?

Have you tried a boot disk? Maybe that would work.

Unplug the HD and turn it on if it did not boot correctorly i don't know whats wrong if it does boot correctly then plug the HD back in and see if it will boot if not then you got a dead HD.

I have pretty much the same problem. According to a friend of mine, it's most likely some pretty aggressive virus that renders your hard drive useless, at least for booting purposes. What I am going to try now, is boot from a Knoppix CD to save whatever data I can, reset the 0-sector and set up the damn thing again. If you find any other solution, please let me know... Good luck!