ibook clicking noise and no booting

Hi,

My ibook is having problems. Recently, I noticed that intermittently my battery would not hold charge (would appear with an x through it). Its been about 2 years since I bought it so I went ahead and bought an extra one in case it happened again. Well, just this aftenoon, before I had gotten around to replacing the battery, bad things started to happen:

First, the ibook froze, and so I forced quit the applications and shut down.
Upon startup there was a flashing question mark and the computer refused to reboot. This was accompanied by a clicking sound on the bottom left of the ibook (in the vicinity of the battery). I tried to reboot with the OSX install disk (as per suggestion of the apple support webpage), but I get the "prohibitory sign" and the computer still won't reboot.

I am not sure what to do next or what the problem could be: just a matter of replacing the battery? or much worse? Help Please! I am so sad...

Thanks

Yeah, I applecared first thing this morning. The tech also said it sounds like my harddrive is going, so I am shipping it off tomorrow. Weird timing, I just recently got my .mac account and an external harddrive to back everything up, I guess the ibook instinctively knew it was a good time to go....

wdlove said:

If you purchased AppleCare, then I would give 1-800-My-Apple a call. Sorry to hear about you problem. It certainly sounds like a hardware problem.

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