Well, I final got the chance to work on my camcorder last night. And I'll be damned I got it to work, by checking the smallest thing that could go wrong on it...The internal battery. I decided that I would try to checking the internal battery as a last resort (after taking the camera apart for the second time to make sure that all the plugs and ribbon cables were connected properly)and all I did was take the battery out, put it back in and then pluged the camera itself in; and BAM it worked. So I think my deal was that the internal battery was too low to even operate things correctly, but by taking that battery out and putting it back in it reset the memory chip and allowed it to at least show me that it still worked. So, I'm going to buy a new internal battery for it when I get the chance and do some further testing. But at least it function again. P.S. what I ment by the "internal battery" was: on the bottom of the camera there is a little door for a battery that looks like a flat pancake. This is what maintains the camera's memory, kinda like a watch or a computer. Let me know if this works for you.