When I boot up my ibook, i get a weird noise. Kinda like a gun from star wars. it plays 6 times and then i get the gray screen with the question mark folder icon. What should I do.

sounds like bad hard-drive check hardware, drive, fans, cdrom, try shift boot/ disabling extensions, to check for software errors звуки как плохое трудн-upravl4ht оборудованием проверки, приводом, вентиляторами, cdrom, выдвижениями ботинка переноса попытки выводя из строя, к проверке для ошибок средства программирования

I thought it was the harddrive.. but when i opened it up to take a look, i noticed that the orange ribon was ripped... so i ordered one and replaced it... and its still doing that noise thing.

If you can get an external Mac-formatted hard drive that you can connect over firwire I would recommend installing an OS on that drive and booting from it to see what is happening. This will tell you immediately if it is the hardware or software of thatinternal drive or something else in the computer. If you need further help in doing that contact me at nephite11@mac.com Good luck!

It is a hard drive problem. The system cannot find your hard drive drivers or something. I had the same problem with my powerbook g4. I don't know if it runs the same as an iBook but this is what I did to fix my problem. When switching your notebook on hold: "apple command" + "alt/option" + "p" + "r" (you do not need to include the "+"). This should allow the system to reboot. Repeat this twice and let go of the keys.