Chosen Solution
At boot w/ or w/o battery, hard drive starts to spin, then stops, fan continues to blow, no chime. On repeated attempts, power cord light changes from green to orange, fan starts then stops. Sort of sounds like I do before coffee in the morning.
Is anything on the screen, i.e. is it completely black, or does it light up? The change of the AC adapter color without a battery installed could indicate that the AC adapter is bad, or that DC-in is bad. You might try a different AC if you have one available, and see if the color change occurs with the other AC. The first thing I would do is try to reset the PMU by connecting to AC without the battery installed, and holding the power button in for ten seconds. You should get a tone, and then see the sleep light flicker. I would also remove the Airport and extended RAM before doing this, just to simplify the situation.
Get your system install disk and insert it part way. Restart and push the CD in then immediately hold down the “C” key and tell me what happened.
