Interesting issue with charger

I'm not sure if this belongs in XP help or here, but it fits more here...

Just today my old laptop charger stopped working entirely and I got a new one from the tech support at my school.
Problem is, after I charged it all up and restarted it, guess what happened?

The Non-system disk or disk error.

It's a HP/Compaq nc2400 with a 60GB (local) hard drive. The thing I find amusing is that before the charger was replaced it booted fine without any issues whatsoever. Now it just... died.

Does anybody know what the hell is going on? I've tried pretty much every combination of solution possible - checking the boot options in the BIOS, booting without charger/battery, etc. The hard drive doesn't even show up when I live CD boot Ubuntu. Hoping it's not a hard drive failure, I didn't get a chance to back stuff up. :sigh:

(And there's no floppy, CD-ROM or external hard disk connected, just the battery and charger.)