Please confirm diagnosis: MB HD death

MacBook2,1

Intel Core 2 Duo

2 Ghz

1GB memory

When I closed the lid several days ago, the MB was operating normally. When I opened the lid today, the desktop looked normal, but I soon found the machine was crashed.

Restarted... Normal start-up chime ... then got the blinking "?" -on-a-folder. D'oh! No bootable image. Also noticed a "tick" sound at about 1 second intervals coming from approximately the location of the right-shift key. Listened closer: it's a whir-tick-whir-tick-whir-tick...

Uh oh.

Booted the OSX Install Disc that came with the machine, no problem. System Profiler shows no sign of a mass storage device excepting the (obviously fully functional) optical drive.

Tried booting the disk again, holding down "D" --as printed on the disc-- to run Apple Hardware Test. Fail. The machine just spits out the disc and flashes a ?.

I conclude: the internal hard disk has left town, permanently. Everything else seems to be OK

Time to get a new drive. Worthwhile ,as the machine was leading a useful life before the HD failure. Plenty of replacement how-to guides available, easy to do, and not very expensive, under $100.

My questions:

o Any room for significant doubt in the diagnosis above?

o I left the MB sleeping in a rather warm room, maybe 90F/32C. Might this have had anything to do with the failure?

o Any reason the Apple Hardware Test would not boot? Any reason to pursue this? I've heard that AHT doesn't really say much in the case of a HD failure.

o Would SMARTReporter (or a similar product, if one exists) likely have warned of an impending failure?

TIA