How can I tell if my HD is too full to work?

I thought my 17"MBP (purchased from Apple in Sept. 2009) hard drive had died. I've been hearing the scraping, squeaking, knocking, scratching sounds for over a year but never tried to figure out what it was. One night I was typing in a MSWord for Mac document and my MBP was being slow (but not horrible, just acting like a PC. common behavior when I'm working in MSWord) Anyway - all of a sudden it started making lots of the noises I'd heard intermittently before, only this time was lots & for a few seconds (or minutes?) then it froze and just quite.
I hard powered it off and have tried all kinds of safe boot/verbose/fsck stuff - just followed as many directions as I could find. I don't understand what I was doing at all. I do know I have powered up holdling cmd-s/cmd-v/holding shift/ and whatever I did to type fsck... I had to do that one a couple times until it said whatever the instructions said it should say. However, it always got stuck on the gray spinning wheel screen and wouldn't actually boot - and was always making noises.
I took the back off to try to remove what people talked about making that noise. I didn't see/feel anything loose so I just put the back on again.
I just finally got it to boot off my original Install disc - the one that came with the MBP. First time it failed, it gave an option of doing a restart, so I did - and it worked!
So now I'm in Utilities
                      -DiscUtilities
                        -Mac OS X Install DVD
                          -First Aid.
The directions say to click 'repair disk', that option isn't available to me (it's gray, can't be clicked on).
I'm wondering if all my data is still on the computer though. I saw in my searching before something about 'HD too full and not booting' but now I can't find those directions. Also, I'm wondering if the whole bit about the sounds is coincidental but not part of the not-booting problem?
I can see on the bottom of the 'First Aid' window:
Capacity: 6.74GB
Available: 19.1MB
Used: 6.72GB
Number of files: 19,307
I am in the fortunate position I am not concerned about lost data. I had my files backed up. If possible I'd rather not re-load all my programs, but not a huge deal if I need to. I am a computer user, but don't "get" technical logic. I don't understand most of what I've done, but I am able to follow step-by-step directions. Any help someone can offer would be greatly appreciated. Thank you.

Disconnect all peripherals from your computer.
Boot from your install disc & run Repair Disk from the utility menu. To use the Install Mac OS X disc, insert the disc, and restart your computer while holding down the C key as it starts up.
Select your language.
Once on the desktop, select Utility in the menu bar.
Select Disk Utility.
Select the disk or volume in the list of disks and volumes, and then click First Aid.
Click Repair Disk.
Restart your computer when done.
Repair permissions after you reach the desktop-http://support.apple.com/kb/HT2963 and restart your computer.

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