Hard drive noise and freezing

I got my new MacBookPro yesterday - OK it's a refurb! Turned it on and went through the setup stuff, which I thought took a huge amount of time give the speed of the thing. Got on the net and went to download firefox. It started fine and then I heard a noise like a clock ticking and the download stopped. The noise probably went on for 20 seconds and then stopped and the download started again for about 20 second and the noise started again. This time I got the "beach ball of doom" and that was it, everything stopped and all I could do was power of and start again. Started up and got exactly the same thing, when ever I tried to down load anything. Everything seems to works fine and all the apps appear to run until I write anything to the hard drive and then I get the noise and then everything just freezes and I have to kill the power. The noise is comming from the front to the left of the trackpad and I'm assuming that the hard drive is in there - if I put my ear on the case it sound like a drive spinning up and then just stopping. Any suggestion or do I have a jiggered hard drive? Thanks

I have had the same problem with my refurb. It kept freezing on me and not booting. The problem only got worse over time and it finally went back to Apple for repair on 7-14-06, however, good luck getting a repair. They confirmed it was a bad hard drive, but have been waiting for parts ever since. Hmmm... bad batch of drives? I called today and they said they would call me back tomorrow with an update. Good luck!

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