Hard drive making a noise, computer crashes.

I bought a Macbook on September, the better choice of white.

Yesterday I started noticing that my Macbook was working in small outbursts. I would write something, but it would take 10 seconds for it to appear on the screen. When I scrolled it stopped responding, working only after another while.

The hd (or at least I suppose it is the hd) is making a noise, not a clicking noise but a noise as if it were working, but always the same sequence. When I turn on the computer it will work fine for a few moments, no noise, but then I open the finder and after a few minutes the noise starts and I can't do anything anymore, and I have to force shut down.

Whenever I try to copy files to my external hd it crashes, when I right click the Finder it freezes and I can't relaunch it. Whenever I can, it never comes up again, it's just the screensaver forever. I managed to copy a few files when it was freshly booted, with the absence of the noise; when I was copying the files the noise started, so I cancelled the copying. About half of them were copied, and when I tried to copy the other half, everything froze.

I manage to keep it running with the monitor open, and I see a kernel_task that is fluctuating CPU use from .8 up to 2-4. Tried to Inspect it, but the computer crashed.

 

I bought it in the States and I'm in Mexico. I read the warranty and it says that with Apple devices that need a power source, the warranty may not be available worldwide.

Well the files I would ideally want to save would be movies and pictures and things like that. Large files that will most certainly crash in the middle of the transfer. Most of them I can get again, except the pictures and some work I've done there...

I've searched other topics and forums and everyone with this problem had their hd die, and they said it was possible to copy the files with the leopard installation disk, so I'll try...

if I reinstall the OS will that delete my files? I guess it's worth trying if not.

 

I just got an error code -36 when I tried copying some Word documents. I ran the OS from the installation disk.