My Macbook Air is making a strange clicking noise and the startup sound no longer plays?

     I just noticed about 15 minutes ago, that whenever I turn on my Mac, every maybe 30-45 seconds it goes, "Click-Click-Click."
I ran disk utility, and had it verify the disk, and it says everything is in the clear. I googled it, and someone had said that to stop the clicking, they just knocked on it, and it turned out to be the fan, so I tapped the part of the computer that was clicking and it settled for making a very low sounding fan noise. Is it possibly the fan and not the hard drive as everybody else has advised? And as far as the startup noise, it still doesn't "Ding" annoyingly. Any advice?

First action to take in this situation is to fully backup your data, possibly a clone.
Take the computer to an Apple store to have it checked out.
Best.

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