Today my father brought his laptop over for me to look at, as he said he was having a strange problem with it.

When you turn it on, it goes to the normal Toshiba screen, then makes some clicking noises for a couple of seconds and then goes to a black screen that says "Disc Read Error, press Ctrl+Alt+Dlt to restart"  Doing so just causes the process to repeat itself.
I can still acess the BIOS screen as normal, but nothing else and everything is set to default.

Am I correct in my belief that his internal hard drive has met it's end?
It never made this clicking sound before, and he says he has not dropped or adversely bumped it. But from my knowledge, the only thing in it that would move and cause a noise would be the HD.

Thanks for all replies.

Nope, that was my first thought too with the CD , but that drive is empty. Nothing external plugged in at all.

I've been trying to get him to upgrade from this thing anyway (2006 model), so at least if it is dead, he would have a good reason to now. Unless he would actually want to replace the HD, he's like that. Never throw away something that can be fixed.

There is the sad/funny part of all this, it had a 150Gb hard drive, with 85% free space!

He only used it to browse the web, and watch DVDs.  I don't think he ever downloaded a single thing on to it. So the good news is he didn't lose any data of value.