Startup Disk? Emergency? Starting up from disk?

Hi All, A friend called, he is using panther on a 12" powerbook. I suspect he threw away his HD on the desktop, or moved it to an external HD and now when starting up he just gets the spinning ball. SO... a couple questions. Help would really be appreciated since he is coming over tommorrow morning in 11 hours...yikes!
Do I have to have him start up again from the restore disk?
I am wondering if I use the T option and make his computer into a drive if I cant repair it via my powerbook somehow, such as copy the HD he moved to his external HD and then move it back again?
Or am I stuck in having to reinstall everything?
Lastly, and most importantly- if he has a slot drive, how do we get the disk into his computer? It is not the drawer opening models of the past....
Advice will be very much appreciated.
powerbook 12" g4 Mac OS X (10.3.9)

Hi Michael
If both computers are firewire enabled you can start up in target Disk Mode, so that his computer is booted from your drive. You will need a Firewire cable.
How to use FireWire target disk mode
Then from your disk utility you can run Repair Disk on his drive.
regards roam

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Message was edited by: what's going on

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MacBook Air (Late 2008 or newer) model number 2,1 or higher
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Message was edited by: Cory James22

<rant>
I wasn't given an option to increase my hard drive size, as I took it in to a "local" AASP. They keep telling me Apple is slow shipping out a new HD, but with my experiences Apple always FedExs a repair order very quickly. If I had known it was the d* hard drive I would have had the thing up and running 2 weeks ago.
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</rant>

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Has anyone experienced this or can confirm this problem:
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http://www.chipmunk.nl/klantenservice/applemodel.html
http://www.appleserialnumberinfo.com/Desktop/index.php
How to find the serial number of your Apple hardware product...
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1349
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/sbin/fsck -fy
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http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=106214

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