Macbook wouldn't boot, somehow sorted itself out, but unsure of the cause

Something happened to my Macbook that I read about in the forums here: It kept making a clicking noise, wouldn't boot, showed a question mark in a folder on a grey background. As per the advice given to others, I decided to put in the system software CD. Since there was already a disk in the drive, I held down the trackpad button then booted it again. The disk came out, and awesomely it booted like normal. I'm not sure what did it, but it's working fine now. My question is, why did it happen and will it happen again? What can I do to keep my hard drive alive?
Thanks

nbsp wrote:
My question is, why did it happen and will it happen again?
Either your hard drive is dying and it tried to boot from an unbootable optical disk,
or your optical drive is going bad
or the optical disk you had in the drive is bad.
Regardless, it probably will happen again at some point.
What can I do to keep my hard drive alive?
Nothing, they all die eventually. The 2.5" hard drives in notebook computers usually die after about 3 years. My last hard drive died after 2.5 years.
You do have good backups, don't you?

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Macbook wouldn't boot, somehow sorted itself out, but unsure of the cause

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