Alienware M9700 Boot Recursion

Hello,

I have an Alienware M9700; last week it was running no problem and I shut it down for a few minutes, turned it back on -- and it went into an infinite boot recursion. I shut it down for a while, unplugged it, took out the battery, all that jazz -- and it still goes into a recursive boot loop (read: after the initial boot sequence, into the CD-ROM -> HDD -> Network). I called Alienware (I may as well have called my 83year old grandmother for help...) and they basically gave me a runaround saying my warranty was up and I cannot even renew my warranty (apparently the only way you can renew an AW warranty is during the period of when it's still active); anyway, I eventually got some vague "suggestions": 1.) flash the CMOS 2.) reseat the HDD 3.) reseat the RAM -- I tried all three, even bought an extra 1GB of RAM, still to no avail. Alienware's "live help" will always net a copy-pasted "please call our 1-800-XXX-XXXX number or check our forums -- but when your warranty is up it seems the support account gets deactivated as well... so yay.

If anyone could please provide some tips or ideas that'd be wonderful. Thanks very much for your time -- and word of the [not-so]wise: do not buy an Alienware

Specs of Laptop:
Alienware M9700
AMD Turion x64 1.8GHz
RAM: 1.5GB DDR PC3200
HDD: 60GB 5M-Fujitsu MHV2060BH

Update:

I ran some diagnostics w/Ultimate Boot CD -- the HDD manufacturer and info is read, but any diagnostic says the HDD is not connected or cannot be read.

Is this a bad boot sector? Or can anything be done?