Machine doesn't boot, I hear HD spin a second, no lights...

Sounds like your logic board is bad or something is wrong with your battery that is killing it on start up. The Mac has four steps during start up, the first one being hardware check. If it fails at this point, your computer will still continue to run--you just don't see any flashing screen or chime. The issue is most definitely hardware related. Assuming your laptop is out of warranty, try removing all accessible hardware and starting up the computer. If that still fails, I would call it an issue with the logic board(assuming the battery is functional).