Desperate. I'm getting the blinking question mark

While trying to boot up my OS X on a Macbook I recieve the blinking folder and the ? mark. I run from the boot cd but once in installation I receive the Select Destination and there's no drive to select. I've went into Disk Utility and tried everything in there but not able to do so because the HD is just gone, it's not showing up anywhere. I've tried the fcsk commands, nothing, I've tried resetting the PRAM but nothing will come up while holding down the command/option p-r keys. So that's not getting me anywhere either.

I've plugged in an external HD which is 93gg. That says can't bootup because wrong volume or something like that. Maybe thought of making an image on there but I have no clue as to what I'm doing when doing that. Making a partition to install an image on there says it will erase all data. Not wanting to erase everything on the external. Just partition maybe 25 gig so an image can be installed of OS X so I can bootup in SOMETHING. I'm frustrated with this thing. It's girlfriends computer, I use a PC which I can fix any problem in an hour or so but this Mac... Shew!! Never thought they crashed, wrong! haha..

If anyone has some support on this or some ideas on how to fix this thing I would highly appreciate it. Seems like one or two threads on this thing and your post is done. Thanks for your time and really hope I can get this resolved. If reformatting and installing is what I have to do then that's what I'll do. Nothing important to speak of. Just want to get it booted up.

Sorry to say, this looks like your hard drive has died.
The only thing to do now is replace it.

Cheers

Hugh

Sadly as advised looks like you are up for a new hard drive. You do not give your model, but as it will not boot from an external drive, probably a PPC G4 or G5?

Get a large drive, and back up the external to that. Then connect the external by firwire, format, set up Apple Partition Map as one, or more, partitions, and format as Mac OS Extended (Journaled). That way the external will become bootable for a PPC.

With firewire, SuperDuper is the best cloning utility.

I agree with comments posted above. If booting from your CD does not do the trick and its not detecting the main drive. Its just two things, 1. the internal HD is not mounted 2. the internal HD is damaged. Do apple hardware test to confirm this. If all else fails you might need to replace it