Update Yesterday the comp started and worked fitfully until I went out. I powered off and on return powered on. Power light came on but there was no activity showing on other light on the box. His hearing is better than mine and he found the hard drive had stuck.
Got son-i-l round tonight and we did an interior clean out and made sure everything was properly seated. he then gave a very light tap on the exterior of the drive and now system is working.
I think I still need to speak to Dell, as a drive in that condition cannot be good. What do you think?
I wasn't present at the diagnosis and so there may be something we don't know but, from what you've told us, I'd say there insufficient evidence to condemn the disk. I suspect you'd get the same response from DELL if you tried to submit a warranty claim.
You can't possibly tell from listening to a drive that it has 'stuck', you can merely tell that it is not spinning. That may imply a faulty disk, or it may imply a faulty connector, or it may be the that the BIOS has not yet requested the disk to spin up. The fact that tapping the disk appeared to help may be relevant, but the mechanical shock would be picked up by other devices too, so it's not conclusive.
You really need to look at the BIOS messages that appear on the console after you power the PC on, these usually give some clue as to why the PC is failing to boot. In the event of a disk error, you may see something like 'HDD ERROR', 'NO BOOTABLE DEVICE' or 'INSERT BOOT MEDIA' or similar, the exact text would vary with different BIOSes.