blinking ? on folder on startup
 

my friend has a macbook pro and recently whenever her computer starts up it has a blinking folder with a question mark on it... i looked up this error somwhere online and it said that one reason may be that the hard drive crashed/a read head broke... i think that this is probably the problem because when the computer tries to start up i can hear a clicking noise coming from it... i was just wondering if i had to replace the hard drive.. if i can replace it with any hard drive and if or how i can recover data from the old hard drive.
thanks

Re: blinking ? on folder on startup
 

Hi,
You can replace the drive with any physical like for like drive, it is not a special or custom drive, of any capacity.

Have you tried to boot from the Tiger disc that would have come with the MacBook Pro? once you boot with that you can run disc utility to diagnose the Hard drive and try for recover any data? If I remember correctly it is under options drop down in the main installeer before you install tiger.