[DRPAM007]

My Gateway 4540 centrino laptop hangs while I was trying to reinstall some printer software. After a forced shutdown (pressing the power button for over6 seconds) it shuts down and on the reboot recommended a disk scan, which I accepted but it was unable to initiate. After a second forced shut down it never came on again. The screen remains black.
The green power LED comes on with either battery or the external power cable.
But the LED that shows hard drive activity does not come on. The fan actually ran for some time.
A guy from Gateway tech support assured me that my hard disk was bad. I bought a new one but still no joy. I think that was rather premature. I would expect the computer to at least load BIOS from ROM/ RAM and then if it cant access the HDD, give an error that it could not find my operating system etc.
I'll appreicate some help on this Please.

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thats really odd......hm....wow. um. im drawing a blank here.

[Tru Techie]

thats really odd......hm....wow. um. im drawing a blank here.

[DRPAM007]

thats really odd......hm....wow. um. im drawing a blank here.

that's what I'm talking about. A real Blank black screen. I dont want to try and tinker with the processor area without first getting some friendly advice from one who's familiar with this sort of scenario.
I'm almost certain that the power supply is fine. I have not tried connecting an external monitor yet.
I have noticed that usually the LED's illuminate to show processor/ HDD activity but that is not happening at this time. I even put the recovery CD in the DVD drive and still it does not fire up at all.

Any pointers, even a wild card will be welcome!