Hard drive damaged and cannot be repaired

I have had a few weird issues with my early 2011 macbook pro 13 inch, updated fully. All of this started after ML. Sometimes, when I power it up there will be a pause and then the signin screen will appear. If I sign in then, the apple logo and the spinning wheel beneath it will appear as usual, however, it will never login, it will just remain that way indefinitely. Also, sometimes when I shutdown, the grey wheel will appear for about 15 seconds and then the computer will shutdown. Therefore, I decided to do a reinstall of Mountain Lion. It took about 3.5 hours and finally it gave a warning message saying, "installation failed, the hard disk is damaged and cannot be repaired. Restart to try again." I restarted and the same thing accured at startup, same message.
When I restarted in disk utility, the Machintosh HD was not available. When I used disk utility application, the verification said, "disk is damaged, click repair disk", but that option is greyed out. I reset PRAM and nothing changed. My verification is still returning errors and 'damaged disk" but not way to click 'repair'.
Also, for most of the time I have had my laptop, moving slightly or lightly bumping the lower, righthand corner of the body makes a clicking noise, almost like sticking a stick into a moving fanblade, but not very loud. This does not occur now as much as it used to though.
Is there anything I can do short of replacing my HDD, although I would be interested in upgrading to an SSD at some point.
Thanks!
Obbie

FieldMarshallObbie wrote:
finally it gave a warning message saying, "installation failed, the hard disk is damaged and cannot be repaired. Restart to try again."
It's very unlikely you'll be able to fix that without erasing the drive.
Do you have backups?  
When I restarted in disk utility, the Machintosh HD was not available. When I used disk utility application, the verification said, "disk is damaged, click repair disk", but that option is greyed out.
There's a very small chance you can start from the Recovery HD and repair the disk from there.  It's probably worth a try.  See the yellow box in #6 of Using Disk Utility.
If that doesn't help, see the pink box there.  If you want to try DiskWarrior, you'll need to borrow a working Mac to download it and put it on a DVD or disk partition.
Otherwise, your only choice is to erase and reformat it, then download a fresh version of OSX (although it sounds like it may be failing -- the clicking noise).  You do that from the Recovery HD, too; see the yellow box in #1 of Using Disk Utility.

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