Eeepc 701 Boot Issue

[LinuxOne]

I know this isn't the preferable place to put this, it would be better in the ASUS forums, but I have a higher rank here and I would be a n00bie there. Here is my prob: I have a 2-3 year old ASUS EEEPC 701 4Gb and it has been working fine for all of that time. I went on a 4 day trip without it, with it plugged into a surge protector, and I come back from the trip, turn it on, POST test is fine, and then goes to a blank screen with a blinking cursor & no drive activity. I had UNR (Ubuntu Netbook Remix) on it (GRUB2, ext4 format, Ubuntu 10.04). I have tried many things to get it to go further (Restore BIOS to original settings, plug it into an external monitor, re-install UNR, and try installing other Linux distros.) When I boot a distro such as Ubuntu 10.04 Alternate Install, it will goto the purple screen where I choose what to do, I choose an option such as install, the external CDROM drive spins up for a few seconds, then stops and I get the blank screen with cursor again. The same thing happens with a SDcard or USB stick. When I do a verbose boot, I seem to recall that the message it stops on is when it loads the initrd but I could be wrong. Then I go and try Windows XP *shudder*. It will ask to press a key to continue, then format the drive, then it will copy the required files over, then on reboot, POST will of course go by, then I get the blinking cursor again. I checked the RAM to make sure it was still seated, its all good, and the SSD is still plugged in. Any remedies or comments are greatly appreciated.

[LinuxOne]

I checked to see what the boot message it stops on is, and it stop after saying

Uncompressing Linux... Ok, booting the kernel.

And then it just freezes, no cdrom or hard drive activity, and this is with all Linux distros that I have tried.