Hey Ho,

So dig it, I have this really old Dell Inspiron 7000 and it has not powered on in years, makes sound like it want's to but then nothing.

I decided to strip it down and for salvage and recycle and as soon as I popped out the HD, BLAMO, the thing powered up. Of course no OS could be found but it was tryin'. I tried again and was able to boot to BIOS.

I swapped out the HD with two others with the same result, no power past an initial whir.

With the HD out I booted to CD to try to reload 98SE, when it got to the choose location selection I popped the HD in and the thing shut down.

I'm kind of at a loss here. Maybe a bad IDE cable? Laptop internals are a bit tricky.

This laptop isn't that important, but it would be nice if I could get it going again.

inserting hdd-s when power is on is not much of a good idea.. and wont work anyways - bios needs to detect them first.
You could clean up inside .. so it would be dust free.
i assume hdd is inserted into a slot on side?
Check if its properly attached to the motherboard (yeah u gotta get it totally open for that).

Make sure that connections are tight and clean.

Also are you running it on battery power. Try by removing battery and use charger to keep it working.
It could be that battery is weak and wont hold enough charge to keep laptop working with hdd - it just eats enough to shut laptop down.

Yea, I've gone through all that, and yea, I know popping in the drive with power on isn't a good idea but I'm just trying to force a response. This thing is a decade old anyways.

So everything looks good on the inside... Just will not power up with a drive in the bay.