This is a really old post and google happened to pop it up. Today I had a MacBook Pro 2008 / 2009 with a failed drive. Needless to say, for testing, I had an old sata sitting around and popped it in -- just to see if I could get an old Snow Leopard DVD to come up -- needless to say the drive had a copy of Windows 7 on it, to my surprise it showed it booting - after a minute or two the system died. From there, you guess it, would not power back on at all.
The solution I found, in case someone stumbles across this: is to remove the battery, the hdd AND remove the ram. Power it on -- you'll get two beeps because the ram is missing. Re-insert the ram, hdd, battery, etc, and it should power back on as usual.
Hope this helps.