Hard drive scratching noises?

I've had my mac book for about 7 months now and i haven't had any problems until now. about a week ago my macbook began to make strange scratching noises whenever i did anything that required a lot of processing power like editing a large photoshop file, it would then freeze and i would have to restart my macbook. the scratching sounds seem to be coming from the hard-drive. now its getting really bad, it even freezes when i try to watch a long video on youtube and the only way to stop it is to turn my macbook off and on again. does anyone have any suggestions, its still under warranty so i could take it back to the shop but i just wanted to make sure there was nothing i could do to fix it.
any help would be greatly appreciated.
thanks
macbook   Mac OS X (10.4.9)  

Those kind of sounds are normal during heavy use. But if it continues to make the sound at all times then your hard drive might become a dud. You should backup your drive/data and try to Repair Permissions via Disk Utility.
If you have never used Disk Utility before here's some useful info:
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=25751
Macbook 1.8 Core Duo   Mac OS X (10.4.9)  

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