Unable to restart Macbook

[teflon]

Tonight, my Macbook suddenly froze (I had Firefox, MS Word, Text edit, iTunes, MSN messenger and Ventrilo on). Despite my multiple attempt to force quit, nothing came up, so I pressed the power button until it shut down. There was a strange clicking noise coming from the spot next to the battery, although I can't say I'm absolutely sure that's where it was coming from. Anyways, I tried to restart it, but all it does is light up to the gray screen, give the Mac starting sound, then instead of the apple a folder with a question mark on it appears. No matter what I do, it refuses to restart. What's going on? Is the hard drive failing?

Just some background information: I had this Macbook for almost 2 years (specs in sig), and lately it has been freezing up (sometimes just individual applications, sometimes the whole computer) more frequently. I kind of just brushed it off. And it often runs a lot hotter than it should be. Like just running Firefox and iTunes will get it to 60+ celsius with the fan kicking in loud enough to be heard clearly. That has been happening for probably close to a year but again I just brushed it off .

Can anyone please help?

 

[JediMeister]

Clicking from the area near the battery (which is the hard drive) is never a good thing. That means that the drive head is bumping into things it shouldn't be. First thing to try would be to boot to the gray OS disc. If you can, open Disk Utility, see if the internal drive shows up. If not, you could try re-seating the drive, essentially removing and putting it back into place and testing again, but chances are its not going to without getting a replacement drive. If it does, on the other hand, you could attempt an archive and install or if that doesn't work, resorting to an erase & reinstall if you have been backing up. Is it me or have a lot of 13" MacBook drives been crapping out lately?

 

[teflon]

I did not back up the computer, which is another huge mistake on my part . Will removing the hard drive/booting with the start up disk erase the data?