imac g5 making noises and running sketch

[manglerbmx]

my room mate has an imac g5 20" 1.8 ghz and recently it starting making some tinkering noises and running slow with beach ball. anyone know whats going on with this? she's getting really nervous about it.

 

[mad jew]

Hopefully it's not a failing hard drive. Back everything up and run fsck. Then, go to Disk Utility in the Utilities folder and make sure that when you select your hard drive (from this app), it states that your SMART status is verified (down the bottom). Also, how much free space is there?