Dead Hard Drive? Help Please!

A friend came to me with a PowerBook G4 12" saying that he was working on it under 10.2, when suddenly "white text" filled the screen. After shutting the computer down and attempting to restart, the computer seemed dead in the water. I have tried the following things to see if I could fix the box:
1.) Used a Mac OSX boot Cd to check installation
2.) Used DiskWarrior to check the directory
The issue is that DiskWarrior and the Mac OSX cd cannot even find a drive to install the software on. The only thing that I have seen on the laptop is a home folder entitled "root". Please let me know if you have any ideas on how to fix this. Hard drive may be dead...
PowerBook G4 12" Mac OS X (10.2.x)

Welcome to Apple Discussions, ScottyP39.
Your guess is probably correct - it does sound ominously like the hard drive is dead.
However, it may still be worth trying to use FireWire Target Disk Mode to see if the drive can be seen from another FW-equipped Mac. Alternatively, if there is a bootable cloned-backup on an external FW drive, then try using that to restart the PowerBook.
15 1.25G/12 1G PBs, Mac minis, iBooks G3/G4, Mac OS X (10.4.3) Cube, TAMs, iPods 2G/4G, iPs, AEBS, AX

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