Is my HDD dead? Flashing Folder Icon, Not working with start-up Discs.

[iheartthehero]

'Kay so, my iBook G4 (Who I refer to as the Macasuarus, becuase it looks so ancient next to my brothers shiny new iBook!) is not responding to anything...

-Not the several install discs that it has with it. (Yes it has several, Yes they're all different and No I don't know which one - which OS - is currently installed on it!)

-It makes a grinding sound every-once-and-a-while.

-The HDD sometimes works...

For instance...
I would press down the button with the apple on it for a real long time and it would boot up properly, but only sometimes. Or once Option-Apple-P-R worked and even pressing C worked...

I really need a computer that is mobile at the moment, so could someone please, please help. And my other laptop just broke today too, coincidently with a dead HDD but it's a Compaq so meh.

Please put these (Your help) in terms any 17 year old girl can figure out. I'm really not techy.

Thanx!

 

[kornyboy]

Wirelessly posted (iPhone: Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 2_2_1 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/525.18.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.1.1 Mobile/5H11 Safari/525.20)

It does sound like you have a dead HDD. You can always check it by sticking an OSX disc in and booting up by holding the "C" key down then running disk utility on it.

I hope this helps.