Laptop: It won't POST or Boot

I have a completely generic no-name laptop that was my father's. I'm a network professional but am stumped when it comes to laptop issues. The problem is, it has a SystemSoft MobilePRO BIOS; version unknown on some kind of mobo that has a chipset made by SiS. I shut her down as usual last night on a plane and when I tried to boot up later at home it's not getting to POST much less activate video OR run thru BIOS & mem checks.

Might anyone have any idea what I can do? Trying a bootable floppy or Win2k CD gets noplace before the system cuts out (almost immediately) and repeats another false startup over and over and over but never getting into running BIOS and booting. You can feel and hear it starting to go thru motions of finding the CD drive with a bootable disk in it. I think the BIOS or something on the mainboard is shot or it's some sort of ACPI issue I can't get at to fix. Is there any way I can pull out the hard disk and find some sort of cable to plug into the harddisk to pull the data off the drive and on to another normal desktop / tower PC? I don't see why a laptop disk can't be "seen" as some sort of plain old IDE disk with the help of some sort of USB adapter cord or anything to get it connected to a standard PC...if there is such a thing. Any ideas?

ALL responses are much appreciated, I'll say that now, and no doubt again to whoever may answer-

BBlegacy

 

I have a Sony Vaio that did that. Just shut off for no reason whatsover. It turned out to be the fan on the processor gave up and the processor got hot and shut down.

 

IDE Adapter HELP

My laptop hdd is not working at all. there is nothing on it. it stops after the post. I recently bought an ide adapter kit and set it up according to the instructions so i could re-install an os onto the laptop hdd via my pc becuase my laptop doesnt have a cd drive. i set the ide adapter up and power on. i can hear the laptop hdd whiring so i know the adapter works but the pc does not pick it up and displays the message insert bootable media into the appropriate drive. so i power off the pc, insert my win95 diskkete and cdrom and start the recovery process. what worries me is that it takes about 3 seconds to format the hdd where on my pc it would take a few mins. after this has done it restarts over and over again trying to format each time. i think the pc is not picking up the hdd. i desided to try to fdisk the hdd from dos. "No fixed drives present" what do i need to do?

somehow i need to get the hdd to work so i can install an os on it but the pc does not pick up the laptop hdd and cannot partition the drive. What can i do?

Please help.

Thanks

thoford