Wirelessly posted (iPhone 4S: Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 5_0_1 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/534.46 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.1 Mobile/9A405 Safari/7534.48.3)
If you have access to a PC and can connect the HDD to it, I recommend getting the FreeDOS program
Spinrite. It's a hard drive recovery and maintenance tool.
If your HDD is making those noises, it's demise may be near. Run that program and it may do 1 of 2 things. It may repair it altogether, or buy you more time to get a new HDD and move your data over to it.