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Just to echo... Back it up, back it up, back it up.
Start with just the important files. Copy things on your desktop and in My Documents or wherever you hide your walnuts, then grab an image of the entire thing.
Yes, noises are bad. It might not mean the drive will die soon but it often does. I had another customer on Friday with a misbehaving Dell laptop. It started to crash with driver problems and would no longer boot. Once I replaced a few "missing" system files the owner mentioned it made noises. Only now and then. I made it 90% through a backup when it horked up a lung. I might be able to recover the rest with parts swapping but basically the $70 drive (2yr old travelstar 80) and the 10% we couldn't get are now candidates for $2500 recovery service.
These incidents are far and away my least favorite part of computer work.
Drives are cheap these days, and terribly unreliable. Given the huge quantities you can lose do not rely on just one.
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There are a vast number of people who are uninformed and heavily propagandized, but fundamentally decent. The propaganda that inundates them is effective when unchallenged, but much of it goes only skin deep. If they can be brought to raise questions and apply their decent instincts and basic intelligence, many people quickly escape the confines of the doctrinal system and are willing to do something to help others who are really suffering and oppressed." -Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media, p. 195
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