Fan or Harddrive Problem?

Lately I have been hearing an unhappy grinding sound coming out of my laptop and it was just horrible this morning when I woke it up from sleep mode over night. I'm not sure if it is my fan or hdd because when my hdd starts going (videos, etc) the fan kicks on and does its thing.
Does anyone have any suggestions of how I might be able to try and narrow down if it is my fan or hard drive? Thanks!

Daniel... your hard drive should generally be running for a while before your fan really kicks in. Basically, your drive is running as soon as you power on your machine. If you don't hear it when you're doing things that don't speed up the fan (which can be any basic operations like viewing web pages (without embedded video)... just looking at text files... etc) it's probably not your hard drive. How old is your machine? Regardless... it's probably a good time to make sure you have a backup just in case. Hard drives don't usually make grinding sounds when they're failing but that's certainly not impossible. Usually by the time you have a drive making those kinds of noises, the drive is already dead. Have you been experiencing any other problems? If you have an external drive, another option would be to create a clone onto your external drive using something like CarbonCopyCloner or SuperDuper (both free for cloning) and then restart your MacBook holding down the "Option" key and select your external drive to boot from. It will be a bit slower to start up as USB/Firewire is much slower than the internal SATA interface... but if you still hear the same noise while your OS is loading up, it's likely the fan. It's sorta tough to tell without hearing it.

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    Several data recovery techniques exist if you need to use them first*:
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