IBM T40 startup failure

Folks,

I own a T40 that has been running flawlessly for the past 3 years. It's a Pentium-M 1.6 GHz with 1 Gb RAM and XP-Pro. Since I'm traveling frequently, I bought a Targus charger, which I've used for the same period. While in Japan 2 weeks ago, I had my laptop on AC, the charger light was on and so was the charging light on my T40. So, I went to sleep leaving the laptop plugged in but turned off. Next morning, I saw that the charger light was still on, but the light on the laptop was off. Hm, pressed the power button, nothing. Pressed it again, still nothing. Holding it down....well, the short of it, nothing that I did was successful in waking up my laptop. Upon coming back to the US I plugged the IBM charger in and nothing happened. Thinking the batteries were shot, I pulled them out and still nothing. Because I've got a lot of data on the harddrive, I pulled it out and using an IDE->USB2 converter tried to mount it on a win2000 box and a Win XP(pro) box. No dice, both systems see a USB mass storage drive but they don't assign a drive letter to it. I can hear the drive spin up but hear no read/write head activity. I'm at a loss to what has happened, but really like to get to the data on the disk.

Any one of the wise gurus out there have a clue? TIA