Intermittent failure to boot, flashing question mark or white screen

So, I've had two MacBooks with similar problems (I am a Mac consultant). The first one would intermittently boot to a white screen, often enough to be annoying. This current one is occasionally booting to a flashing question mark. My first thought is, of course, the hard drive, but in both cases the hard drive tests fine using SMART Utility, which is usually great at giving advance warning when a drive starts experiencing hardware errors.
On the first MacBook, the one with the white-screen boots, I tried reinstalling the system with no effect; replacing the drive eventually made the problem go away. The current MacBook, with the question-mark boots, has already had its drive replaced once, when the stock drive failed.
I will reseat the drive, which is all Apple could suggest. I just wonder if anybody else had experienced something like this and can offer any information about what might be going on.

Thanks for the reply. Aside from finding that holding the mouse button down at boot might cause a flashing question mark, I already knew all that. I will ask the owner if she is leaning on the trackpad button when she starts up her computer in the morning.
I've already reset the power manager and the PRAM; we'll see if that makes any difference. The puzzling thing here is that the problem is intermittent.
I also need to ask her if, when the computer does boot to the question mark, there has been a chime first. Somehow I think there has to be, for the system to have gotten as far as looking for a boot drive. I couldn't find anything useful in the logs; not surprising, since if it can't find a drive to boot to, it won't have anything to write a log to.
Again, the mystery is why the failure to boot is intermittent. If it happened every time, I'd know what to do!
Thanks
cavenewt

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    Note: The information provided in the link(s) above is freely available. However, because I own The X Lab™, a commercial Web site to which some of these links point, the Apple Discussions Terms of Use require I include the following disclosure statement with this post:
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