Hardware Trouble Shooting Marc17's Computer Help Page Checking Hardware Hardware can be very troublesome to check. Sometimes the only way to test it is to put it into another machine and see if it works. Not everybody has multiple machines to try this with and that doesn't always reveal a fault.
Battery Just buy another one and put it in.
Cables Either swap out the cable with a new one, or replace a known good cable with the one in question. If your computer is getting power, but the harddrive doesn't come on or make any noise, it's probably bad. Check your power connections. One possible solution is to lightly 'thump' the hardrive or case when trying to boot the computer. Sometimes the drive heads get stuck and this frees them up.