This one has me stumped and annoyed. I got a message that my collaborator's laptop isn't booting. It's an older model Gateway ms2252 (I think) and has had a real issue with overheating, especially now that it's around 25C outside and has very little in terms of fans. My immediate thoughts were either:
-Corrupted MBR/GRUB
-Bad BIOS
-Hardware failure

I get over there and it really isn't booting. It hits the splash screen and I could access the BIOS and, but it wouldn't boot from the HDD or my boot disk and only shows a blinking cursor on a black screen. Every fix that I looked up needs to be able to boot to some sort of media. The only one that I didn't check was the Windows 7 CD but it seemed like a long shot. I tried setting the BIOS back to it's default settings but no dice with that either.

Apparently before dying it was running some programs and simply shut off. This is usually from heat and it makes me think that it's a hardware failure. The MOBO and CPU usually ran around 80C (95C without a cooling pad :/) and might have finally given up after over a year of doing this. I can probably remove the HDD and backup the data but I have no idea how/if we can get it back into a working condition. The most important thing is to get it booting any media; if it's BIOS or MBR/GRUB related I can probably fix it.

So, the big question is: Am I missing something or is it just an expensive paperweight now? I'm not an expert, so any help would be wonderful, but I won't have access to it until Tuesday to try anything out.

Thank you in advance,
~CW