Laptop Hardrive Question

Perhaps I am bad at searching, but Google is not coming up with anything.
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I wish to know if an error in powering the hard drive (or something) can break a laptop.
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2~3 years ago my Vostro 1320 died. For about a month prior, it would occasionally have issues with booting and I would have to turn off/on to try again. After it officially broke, whenever I attempted to turn it on, the flashing lights would signal that something was wrong with the motherboard - the back-light never came on i.e. it remained as it outside of the built in ...uh..."error lights".
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I would periodically turn it on to test it as a previous dell computer of mine magically fixed itself once (actually twice now...). 6~8 months later I turned the vostro 1320 on again (no HDD inside, I was using it for my desktop) and it worked.
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Since then I have been using it with a puppy linux via a bootable flash drive. I am no longer using it's old HDD on my desktop. Is it possible the HDD's relationship with the motherboard somehow "broke" the laptop, or would it be safe to put it back inside the laptop? I wish to put a linux OS (likely debian) on it, but I am paranoid that it may break again.

 

One of the first steps one should take when a PC will not post is "pull" or disconnect the hard drive. This is of course after re-seating the RAM modules, and testing the power supply.

If the BIOS is accessible with the drive removed/disconnected, it's pretty much a dead giveaway what the problem is...

 

The bios is accessible now, but it was not before - the screen did not turn on, only the diagnostic lights (caps lock, wifi on, etc) would turn on. There was a 4~5 month period where it did not have a HDD in it and it still did not work (probably tried 2~3 times).
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If I remember correctly, I had taken the laptop completely apart and cleaned it. I had swapped the RAM out to another 1 GB stick to test. The HDD was removed early on as I began using it as my desktops main HDD. The HDD did have a bad sector(s), but that never caused issues for the ~1 year I used it on my desktop. The power supply had minor issues, but as far as I could tell it was fully functional (using it right now), so I never bothered fixing it (needs some electrical tape inside, shorted out when plugging in rarely).
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I do not know why it woke up after a few months, but since it has been working for over a year now (almost always on) without using the HDD, I am wondering if powering the HDD was somehow related to the (should have been permanent) failure - I cannot think of anything else /hmm. Puppy Linux unloads itself upon boot and runs directly off the RAM, so the RAM is and was fine.