MacBook Pro (snow leopard) 2006 will not restart. Getting blank screen with folder (?)

MacBook Pro (snow leopard) 2006 has begun to turn off attached Cinema Display over the last two days. Comes back on on restart. This morning, the MacBook screen also went blank white on restart. Tried to use Snow Leopard CD to restart but it was ejected and folder with ? is only thing that displays. Will not restart. Have replaced hard drive 6 months ago. Help! What's wrong? I need this computer for work.

hawpotr wrote:
1. replace my current internal HD and convert it to external HD for use as secondary boot drive,
No.  That has no advantage for you.
leave the internal HD alone and purchase an external HD that I can clone and use as boot drive in case of emergency?
Yes.  I use Carbon Copy Cloner to make a boot drive and as a backup (in addition to Time Machine).  CCC allows one to make incremental changes as well as creating a copy of the recovery partition.  This means that if run on a proper schedule, you data will; be well protected and the MBP can be in operation very quickly if the internal HDD should fail.
A clone should be a 2.5", 9 mm thick SATA HDD so that it will fit inside the MBP.  It can be powered from the USB port thus not requiring an AC outlet.  In my collection of HDDs, I favor HGST and Seagate products.  I principally use OWC enclosures that allow for USB, Firewire and eSATA connections.  These are expensive but one can use a more modest one as well of one can tolerate longer data transfer times.
Here is a link showing some available SATA HDDs that will complement your MBP:
http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/hard-drives/2.5-Notebook/
You can look for enclosures on the same web site.
Ciao.

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