Dented my Macbook Pro and now it won't start up. Please Help!

Hello. I have searched and searched and cannot find a solution.
Last night I was putting the finishing touches on my dissertation and accidentally dropped a tape dispenser on my 1-year-old MacBook Pro - it hit just to the left of the trackpad and left a nice little dent! After the "incident", I was attempting to pull up Word and the machine completely froze. I turned Mr. Mac off by holding down the power button and when I tried to restart, I never got past the Apple logo with the little spinning circle. After trying many times to restart, I made it to my desktop only twice, and after the dock appeared (with no menu bar above or desktop icons), the machine froze again. Each time, I heard the hard drive working until the big freeze.
I was able to boot off of the Leopard install disc and ran "repair disk" on my hard drive - no errors were found. Tried restarting again and got nothing. I have since tried restarting with various key combinations and the machine only responded to "C" and "Option".
This morning, I searched again and decided to try the "optioncommand+pr" to reset the PRAM as suggested to another damsel in distress with a similar issue. Now, when I try to restart, I get the gray screen followed by the chime, and then nothing - no hard drive working, no Apple logo, no spinning circle, nothing. My install CD will not spin and I none of the start-up key combinations work. It just sits there staring at me with that gray screen - laughing because my dissertation is in there somewhere and I can't get it out! Yes, I have backed my maching up on a 500G external hard drive, so I haven't lost much - but I can't access my hard drive without Mr. Mac! And I am a lonely Mac owner here - no others to borrow!
I am going to an Apple Store on Saturday, but I thought I would give you guys a chance to save my life first. Any suggestions for this girl and her Mac would be great! I am defending my dissertation next week and I'm about one small crisis from a major meltdown!!!!!!
Thanks!

Well, my two-month-old MBP has no qualms about booting from a no-name external USB HD I put together...
Given that is is a common point of failure, I would imagine a large Apple Store should keep a stock of HD's on hand.
Now since you're a bit desperate and the genie pops up til Saturday and you seem to be the enterprising kind, let's try an experiment: if you have room enough in the external HD and assuming it isn't a Time Machine volume, why don't you plug it in, stick the Install CD and see if the installer lets you select the external drive as the install target. If you can install Leopard on it, on top of the backup without reformatting, and the Mac can boot from the drive afterwards, at least you would have some functionality restored and would be able to pull your stuff from the internal HD. Apple says booting from USB drives is not supported but that does not equate to not possible; some brands do work. Risks? Always. You can always lose your backup. Like I said, a challenge for an enterprising gal....
Next time around, consider having a bootable external clone at hand for rainy days. I keep three myself...
P.S. Since I'll be in the Dallas-FW area in late June, I can volunteer with the confetti....

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Given that is is a common point of failure, I would imagine a large Apple Store should keep a stock of HD's on hand.
Now since you're a bit desperate and the genie pops up til Saturday and you seem to be the enterprising kind, let's try an experiment: if you have room enough in the external HD and assuming it isn't a Time Machine volume, why don't you plug it in, stick the Install CD and see if the installer lets you select the external drive as the install target. If you can install Leopard on it, on top of the backup without reformatting, and the Mac can boot from the drive afterwards, at least you would have some functionality restored and would be able to pull your stuff from the internal HD. Apple says booting from USB drives is not supported but that does not equate to not possible; some brands do work. Risks? Always. You can always lose your backup. Like I said, a challenge for an enterprising gal....
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Dented my Macbook Pro and now it won't start up. Please Help!

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