ok this morning i hooked the compaq HDD to my Dell as a slave drive, and downloaded the user files etc. the compaq HDD will not boot. testing it on a win98 system, it said that there was no operating system found; on windows xp, it says that primary 0 cannot be found.

so, the hard drive is screwed as well.

i also tried booting the compaq from a windows XP home edition install disk (not a recovery disk) and it won;t read the cd, and does not display any video signal.

I am going to try to swap motherboards again.... (sigh)

Good luck with that, let us know how you get on..... fingers crossed :|

The warranty company has decided to go with a full replacement. They gave up, too.

Oh, well.