Hello Sir... Well I did as you suggested and no go.. You must be correct, it must the motherboard. I bought a new battery and it didn't help.. I put it in and started up.. IT moaned and groaned about date and time being set wrong.. I set it, looked and seen the hard disk and the dvd drive was detected, they were.. After setting the clock I rebooted and it did the same thing, media check failure etc, looked in the bios and the hard drive and dvd burner was not in there.. Unfortunately I don't have a warranty (it is about 2 years old) I guess 1000 dollars out of my pension wasn't enough, they w