H140 no longer powers on after rockbox removal

[vicarious]

I removed rockbox from my iRiver H140 by deleting the .rockbox folder and kept the bootloader.  All was fine for a year.  Then I upgrade the HDD from 40 to 80 GB last week.  The problem that followed was minor but annoying.  It would freeze at the bootloader stage after the standard message "Bootloader version 6".  By stopping and restarting, every 2nd or third attempt would boot to the firmware.  Then it just stopped doing going to the original firmware at all (freeze after the above bootloader message).  Going to the install manual I worked out to hold Rec key while starting.  That seemed to work, but its awkward, so i decided to remove the bootloader. 

To remove the rockbox bootloader I downloaded the firmware and connected the H140 to the USB and copied the firmware hex file (fresh from the iriver site) to the root folder on the iRiver.  All was fine.  I even used windows XP "safely remove".. to disconnect the player.  However, the problem, and the point of my posting here, is that after this my player will no longer power up at all!  No activity of any kind.  Blank screen with any and all buttons pushed.  I never got it to restart, so I never got to reflash the thing.  As far as I can tell, it should have simply restarted the rockbox bootloader.  I had it connected to and from the USB port many times in since upgrading the HDD.  I all makes no sense to me.  A perfectly good player - now no activity of any kind!!!  I would really appreciate any kind of help!

Notes
- Battery is a year old, and was fully charged at the time of all this (I plugged the charger in anyway for 2 hrs  and it had no effect)
- no other things went wrong or were unusual
- I cannot power it on when plugged into the USB port of my PC either.

Is there anything to do when there is a stone cold dead screen this way?



Edit:  Good news (for me)!  I discovered the "reset" button on the bottom of my H140.  I never considered it before because I assumed it would need to be powered on first to work.  Well, guess what? - it does not need to have the screen working for reset to work.  I reset it, continued on the load the hex, and all is well in the world again.  What a relief.  This must be the shortest post in history...