MacBook doesn't start up properly

I had a customer bring in what is supposedly a water damaged MacBook (a 2007 model, I believe, I'm not looking at it right now). At first, it seemed to be in the middle of a firmware update, and the screen would turn on and off as would the fans for a while, before settling down a bit. Once it started showing the Apple logo, it now boots to either a blue screen or the login screen and will immediately go into sleep. When I try to wake it up, I can enter characters into the password field but the laptop goes right back to sleep again. I recorded a video of the behavior: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2nhrCxGJVF0 (skip the first 30 seconds). I have tried doing a safe boot, which does boot (I can see red French text which I assume reads safe mode) and zapping the PRAM a few times, which didn't help.
I put in another hard drive with Ubuntu installed and attempted to install 10.6 on it, but Ubuntu booted up instead - and everything works absolutely fine! Puzzling.
The disc I was using is a copy of a retail 10.6 DVD (yes, I bought it, and no, I'm not a pirate) which loads the options for Remote Install when put in a PC, so I assume it's working. I will have to check with the customer to see if she has the original discs but based on past experience, it's not likely.
Anxiously awaiting your replies!

It sounds like a hard drive issue. Either a corrupted file system or physically dying. You can try running Disk Utility or fsck on it. You can do it from the Snow Leopard install disk.
http://support.apple.com/kb/TS1417
Now it sounds like you may have already tried that, in which case you should try installing 10.6 on a new hard drive. To boot from a CD/DVD do one of the following.
Restart your computer and immediately press the Option key. Icons for all available startup volumes will appear. Click the one you want to boot from, and then click the right arrow button to complete the startup process.
Restart your computer and immediately press Command-Option-Shift-Delete. You must press all the keys at once. The computer will start to boot from the CD or DVD drive. If there isn't a bootable disc inside the drive when you begin the reboot, the computer will attempt to boot from another partition or drive.
Restart your computer and immediately press the c key. The computer will look for a bootable CD or DVD and, if it finds one, will use it as its startup device.
You can use disk utility to erase the ubuntu hard drive and then proceed with the installation of OS X.

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