It made sense...

Hmmm... At this stage, it might be a good idea for someone local to have a look, or for you to send it for repair.

Is this a single drive player? If so, you might want to move the drive from one connector to the other and do a test boot. If it is a dual drive player, disconnect each drive (in turn) and do a test boot on each. By test boot, capture the console log from hyperterminal and watch that scanning IDE area - see if a drive is discovered or not. Perhaps you have one bad drive (or bad connector) that is "taking them both out"...