What happened to the battery?

Your battery is beeping? Or your car?

1. Does the engine turn over at all when you try the ignition?

2. Do you have the leads connected correctly. ie positive lead (red) to the positive terminal (+) and are they making a good connection? Hit the connections with a hammer or similar (a shoe may do it) to see if a bettter connection can be made.

3. If your friend drove his car some distance with your battery installed and the alternator in his car was not charging your battery (which would seem likely) his car would have sucked any stored electricity out of your battery. Jump start your car and drive for 1/2 hour should fix this.

ha! similar thought here

That sounds like a textbook on how not to jumpstart a friend's car...

You do not take the battery out of your own car. You get the two cars close enough together so that cables will reach, leave your engine ON, connect the cables, wait for four or five minutes, and then rev your own engine slightly and try to start the other car.

gunga's right. There's no reason whatsoever to remove a battery in order to give a car a jump start.

First, your friend needs to not be doing things he prolly may be clueless about...

I am guessing that your car has a security feature that resets when the car has zero power (when you took the battery out)

When you reconnected the power (put the battery back in) the system must reset...

What kinda car we talkin' bout?

I have always been told that you should NOT start the engine of the good car. I was told that the jumpers effectively make the bad car start off your battery, so there is no reason to have your car running. I've even heard if there is an electrical problem with the bad car, it could damage the good car if they are both running.

Misinformation sucks! I just googled it to see the right way once and for all, and found this edmunds.com article. I think edmunds should be reliable. So gungasnake says basically the same thing, he is correct.

What is the point of having the car running? Does the alternator push power to the bad battery that way or something?

(I'm guessing a 2002 Honda Accord. Let's watch and find out ...)

No chance at all that the friend inadvertantly switched batteries, and is now driving around with your very nice battery. I ask because that's the only reason I can think of to remove the battery from the good car.

My car battery was dead recently, and all the taxi drivers I called to help me jump it refused to do so from their cars and would remove the battery claiming that it could damage their cars. They wouldn't even jump start it off their batteries while it was attached to their cars and would take it out to do so.

Their batteries were never powerful enough to get it going and if one of them had just done it with the engine running (reving a bit to give the extra power I needed) I wouldn't have had to go through so many taxis.

Thing is, I'm not convinced that they are wrong. I do think it's possible to harm the boosting car in certain rare conditions and haven't seen any of the advice advising you to start the boosting car rule it out. In this link there's a bit about a guy claiming to explain why it can happen but I've heard an awful lot of mechanics claiming this recently using various reasons.

Anyway, my car in the states would turn off its lights automatically, and my car here in Costa Rica doesn't so I have had a lot of recent experience with jump starting and here are the things I learned when the jump start doesn't seem to work.

1) Sometimes you need to run the booster car for a while before the dead car will start and rev it a bit to get the other car going. I have seen this take as long as 10-15 minutes before the dead car will start.
2) If that takes too long or you don't want to wait you can take the battery out of the dead car, replace it with the battery from the live car and start the dead car. Then, while the engine is running you can swap the batteries again. Just don't turn off your car until you get home or are sure the battery itself isn't the problem or it might not start again (I also have a lot of recent experience with bad batteries because a lot of the "new' batteries sold here are refurbished old ones).

And a quick tip: get the positive and negative cables right, I've seen someone do it wrong and melt the cables in a shower of sparks.

In one of my many recent episodes jump starting a car, that was the only way it would start. I'm not sure exactly why, and it might just have been bad connections from corrosion when using the cables but we tried it for 15 minutes with cables and it ended up only working when swapping the battery out.