well..i took the cable off of the mother board and noticed that one of the little pins was loose..meaning that the solder on the mother board had dried out and thus the contact was not being made.

interestingly enough..this was also the source of a great deal of engine whine..my own personal gremlin!

What i did was bend the pin down so that it was again touching the mother board, then carefully replaced the IDE cable...plugged it in via the a/c adapter and it booted just fine!

put it all back together and slammed it in the sled and it booted fine as well

so i now have to just resolder this pin someday...

but i thought it was very interesting that this loose connection affected the grounding of the unit!

Ed