Samsung notebook clicks on boot, won't pass BIOS

[Naphtha]

I'm trying to repair a laptop for a friend and not having much luck, I'm hoping someone here might have some insight.

It's a Samsung NP300V5A-A04UK running Win7. I'm told it was occasionally playing up and making clicking noises and failing to get past the BIOS, but that taking the battery out and leaving it for 10ish minutes would cure it. It is now rarely getting past BIOS and my friend managed to use to the recovery media to get it back to a factory install.

I suspected the hard drive was failing but on one of the rare occasions I have gotten it to boot using UltimateBoot I ran a hard drive surface test and a memory test which found nothing wrong. If it was simply a bad hard drive though I would have thought that I could still reliably boot from CD or USB, but I can't even get to the BIOS settings before it locks up.

Does anyone have any ideas of what I could try next?

 

[popatim]

Remove the HDD and see if you can replicate the 'cant even get into the bios' problem again.
If the problem is gone then it definitely is the drive or circuitry to the drive.

 

[Naphtha]

Okay, removed the HDD and now I can boot from CD reliably now.

I plugged the HDD into a dock and tested it again and it still seems fine, so I reseated most of the wires in the notebook and plugged the HDD back in and everything seems hunky dory.

I'll give it until the morning and then I'll check again.