IMac hanging... is my Hard Drive dead?

Last week my 20 inch iMac (bought mid 2007, just after launch)started hanging weirdly. For no apparent reason, I got the Spinning Beachball of Death and everything was frozen. The dock was appearing when I moused over but no response, not possible to click or right click on anything. No response from the force to quit shortcut either. I have Menumeters in my menubar so could see that the CPU was idle and there was no access to the hard disk (up or down) but I could hear it do its little 'reading data' ordinary noise, like forever. So I rebooted using the power button. Everything went fine but it hung back on me after less than a minute. I was in the kitchen using bluetooth mouse and keyboard, so I unplugged the iMac and went to my computer room to try with the wired keyboard and mouse, just to be sure. Booted, SBoD'd after 30 seconds. Re-Booted, hanged on the grey apple/spinning gear screen. Read this forum, learned about the SMC reset thing. Tried the thing while thinking 'Hey, I just did that when I switched rooms'. Nevermind. Booted! Yay! I was able to actually use my computer for something like 30 minutes before the next hang. I even had the time to refresh my Time Machine backup(wich will come handy if, like I apprehend, my HDD is the culprit). But now I'm back in the Reboot/Beachball loop of h*. I also tried booting from the Leopard install disk to run disk utility but it didn't see my hard drive.
So, what do you think?
any answers?
any questions?
thanks in advance
Gabriel
Message was edited by: GabLeCrabe

I tried safe mode but the problem was still there. Then I tried to run disk utility again but from the install disk that came with my iMac (OS 10.4.10), not from the Leopard install disk. It worked! I could see my Hard Drive. So I ran a repair disk routine, but it said everything was fine. Then I tried to repair the permissions and it had a very long list of bad permissions to repair. I had never seen such a long list, and I never tought for a second that could be the cause of my troubles, you know, with all the debate over permissions being a big deal or not, I came to neglect them.
So now my iMac has been running without a hitch for something like 12 hours. I'll keep it under observation for a few days just to be shure, but it still is a big relief to have it back...
@seanlon: the sound I was talking about was really the ordinary Hard drive sound, not the 'hurry-up-and-save-what-you-can-before-it-dies' clicking and grinding sound that I experienced a few years ago with another computer. I also think a computer with mechanical parts like a HHD and an optical drive can never be completely silent. Maybe a SSD Macbook Air is, I don't know...

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