Help! 12" PB hard disk on its death bed?

Hey,

I have a 12" PB (miniDVI, 1GHz G4, 768MB RAM, 40GB HDD, AE, BT, combo). Over the last few days, its been running very slow, and has beachballed until its required a hard reset to get it back again. I've repaired permisions, reset the PRAM, verified/repaired the disk, but to no avail. I'm currently reinstalling OSX from the software restore DVDs, and its taking hours! Its been running for nearly 2 hours now, and still only 27% of the way through "Processing BSD Subsystem".

Why do I think its my hard disk? Because it seems to be doing a lot of 'extra' work. Even on idle, the harddisk is (was) whirring and clicking a lot - no 'abnormal' noises, just as though it was 'doing' something. HDD intensive tasks seem *a lot* slower (searching, indexing my email, copying to/from NFS mounts). Also, its recently starting showing the folder with the question mark in it on boot for a second or so every time, without fail. Other times, its stayed for 10-15s, or thrown a kernel panic part-way through booting. Any suggestions? I've backed up all my data, and just doing a clean install of OSX, so we'll see what that does.

Thanks in advance,

mrJ

ah crap. i was hoping I wouldn't hear that. Oh well, atleast its within warranty. Just bought my first home, washing machine got delivered, turns out its faulty, getting married in 2 days - our honeymoon reservations have disappeared at their end, so all in all, I'm a tad stressed! This is the last thing i need!!

Ah well, atleast I've still got all 4 limbs intact...