Hibernation and startup issue on laptop

Hi

I have a relatively new compaq mini 700 net book, running XP OS, which has not had any previous problems, however after going into hibernation will not start at all, the light flickers about 5 times then nothing, it will not boot up, below is the sequence of events;

1. Transend 500Gb external hard drive recently plugged into an iMac using snow leapard OS, tried to format it to HTS+ would not work, kept saying something about an error.

2. Decided to plug into the net book and format it to Fat 32, so that later I could try again to format into HTS+ on the iMac.

3. Transcend was not recognised in my computer, I went to admin/computer management, but it would not start up, had to enable something in services, which I did.

4. While doing this I noticed that AVG 2011 needed updating, did this then started to try the hard drive again, while all of this was going on, a message appeared saying something about MSVC was missing, then the computer froze up, I could do nothing with it, so I held the power button down until the system closed down and unplugged the Transcend hard drive.

5. I then rebooted the system and looked at my computer for the drive which I had plugged back in, to no avail, I then started AVG again and started the update process as well, while doing so the same MSVC message appeared, the system then started to shut down and showed the hibernation message.

6. I then tried removing the battery and also the power supply and waited for a while, with no success, I tried the same again but the second time after removing the battery and power supply I held the power button on for a couple of minutes, I believe this was something I had read once before about discharging the power in the system, anyway after connecting everything back up again, the only thing that happens is about 5 short blinks of the power light and then nothing, each time it's the same.

I really could do with some advice on this issue, if anyone has any ideas, it would be appreciated, thank you.

Regards

Pozzy