Growling Powerbook - dead hard drive?

Question

Hope someone can help with this. Basically about six months ago the PB started growling intermittently, and was stopped simply by tilting the PB slightly. Then for ages it didn't do it at all, and put it down to 'one of those things'.
In the last couple of weeks or so it started again, and today pretty much stopped being intermittent and became permanent bar for getting the machine in some ludicrous upside down position, and even then only for seconds - so basically is currently unusable.
When it growls, the beachball spins, and nothing responds.
My best guess is that it's a dead or dying hard drive - it's about 3.5 yrs old, and has been used exhaustively on a daily basis - so I can accept that it's wear and tear.
Fortunately I've been making regular back ups suspecting that this day was on it's way.
I guess I'm just trying to suss out now if it is most likely to be the hard drive, rather than, say, the board?
It's an 80GB HD, with 1GB RAM, and around 20gigs free.
Any pointers on this appreciated.

Answer 1

You may be able to find a local computer shop that'd be willing to take a stab at doing the repairs, or you could ask Apple itself for an estimate of what they're likely to charge for that kind of thing.
I would definitely study the instructions carefully before attempting to replace the hard drive in a laptop for yourself. The RAM is designed to be easily accessed/removed/replaced by a user for the powerbook, but the hard drive isn't. That doesn't mean that it's impossible to reach it, just that there's going to be more finesse involved. Find a guide that has pictures, preferably, so you can have a real sense of what you'll be getting into and whether you feel comfortable that you can do it, or if you'd feel safer paying more for someone else to.
I can't say that I've ever replaced the hard drive in my powerbook, but typically hard drives are one of the easiest parts to swap in and out on a computer, because their behavior in relation to the rest of the computer is very well standardized (in contrast to say... graphics cards, which need special drivers and still may not work properly after they've gotten them).
Typically, you can just swap the other hard drive into the system, attach the cords, insert the install CD, and away you go.
What I would suggest first, however, is that you see whether your computer can be coaxed into booting off of a "LiveCD". There are several operating systems (versions of Linux and BSD especially) where you can boot and run the entire system off of the CD or DVD rather than the installed system on the hard drive. (Often this is used to either repair a system or to test for hardware compatibility). At the very least, if the boot process can run from a liveCD all right, that'll be an indication that the other components in your laptop are still working properly.