MacBook won't boot...not like I've ever seen before.

I have a friend who has a 15" MacBook Pro model from mid-2009. He called today because when he turns on his MacBook it goes right to a blue screen and won't boot. He lives 7 hours away but it just so happens that I'm going there next week and I will stop to check it out, but figured I might ask to see if anyone here knows. So here's the situation.
The MacBook is running Snow Leopard 10.6.4 and it was in sleep mode. When he opened the lid the computer wasn't responding so he did a manual powerdown and when he turns the computer on, it makes the chime but goes directly to a blue screen and after a few seconds the folder with a question mark starts to blink.
I know that the question mark means that the system can't be found meaning either there's a corrupt system file or the hard drive quit, but I've never heard of this appearing on a blue screen, usually it's grey.
His system DVDs are back in his hometown (he is in university) so I couldn't get him to do either a Hardware test or run Disk Utility, but I have a 13" MacBook Pro so I will bring my system DVDs out with me to do diagnosis.
Anyone ever experienced this? I can't find anything like this anywhere. I had him reset the PRAM, the SMC, and also tried to get the thing to boot into Safe Mode and Verbose, but no luck. Holding down the option key during startup brings the blue screen again, but with a cursor.

I meant to post what I found when I got my hands on it, but totally forgot. Here's what happened:
When I got his laptop I booted it into FireWire Target Disk Mode and connected it to my Mac. I opened Disk Utility and and error came up saying the connected hard disk needed to be initialized. I couldn't access the filesystem. I tried running diagnostics via Disk Utility and with fsck in the Terminal, with no luck. I did some searching on Google and found an article explaining how the filesystem can basically become broken when a key file is either overwritten or altered.
The article suggested using DiskWarrior, which I got and ran the program on the corrupted hard drive. It warned me that by doing the diagnostics some files may disappear, as it basically undo's whatever caused the filesystem to die. It only took a minute and just like magic the disk showed up on my desktop.
I backed up all the user files and then wiped and restored the OS and Applications and user files. I couldn't tell if there were user files missing as it wasn't my computer but at least it got fixed! DiskWarrior has now joined my arsenal of fix-it apps.

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