MBP HD beginning to grind

My hard drive has begun emitting a slight grinding sound in both Windows and Mac OS when the computer is on. I know this is a bad sign, but are there any steps I can take before getting a new drive to help prolong my drive's life? And, if not, could somebody post a link to a guide to creating images for both a Boot Camp partition (I've got Time Machine for my OS X partition).

Thanks

 

No steps can prolong a HDD's life once it starts to fail - you're working on borrowed time here.

IMMEDIATELY back up at least your data from the BootCamp partition to external HDD or DVD, and make sure your TimeMachine backup is updated too - these steps are the most important. If you have an external (windows formatted) hdd, you can also just clone the Bootcamp partition to external hdd (if you have one) via free utilities from WD or Seagate (they have tutorials online) or I've heard that Acronis True Image might have a free trial of their clone utility.

Check SMART for your hard drive to see if it suggests problems or failures, but you might as well just buy a new HDD and get it over with.

 

Thank you for all the tips ClearSkies. My drive stopped making noises, for some reason, but I'm still going to go ahead and replace it...I don't want it to fail at an inopportune time.

 

Niemassacre what Clearskies said is perfect. I just got a hold of my friends 14 month old MBP. The onboard HDD is ticking and the drive is unmountable and cant be read at all. The data is most likely gone for good. He had 3 years worth of notes from his law degree on it, some of which are irreplacable. And wouldn't ya know it he hadnt backup up the data, dispite its imortance. From 1st ticking to failure was less than 12 hours.

A great free backup program is Superduper available here,

http://www.shirt-pocket.com/SuperDuper/SuperDuperDescription.html

You can do a full clone of your drive so no re-installs of the OS or programs will be needed. If you get an external caddy you can clone the internal onto the new external and then pop the new one into the MBP. You will be back up and running without any issues or changes (apart from a working HDD obviously).

Try and do a move of your most important files to a usb drive asap before running a full clone. If you can do it in small batches to try to put as little stress on the drive as possible that would be better. Also don't use multiple torrent downloads until the drive has been replaced as repeated small read/writes outside the OS's usual workload may remove valuable minutes/hours from the drives remaining life due to the needle running around the disk surface like a lunatic to accomodate the torrent clients requests.