First, i would check the warranty on the drive because if you are near the end you want to notify the hard disk mfgr right away, then work on diagnosing.
Maxtors have either a 1 or 3 yr warranty.
Most Seagates have a 5 yr warranty but some have 3 yrs.
I forget about western digital, but i think its 1 yr, but check this out at the hard drive mfgrs website where you can find the info as to if your disk is still under warranty.
If you cant find the place to check it out, email the tech support.
Now to see if the disk is bad or not. Ticking noises are not a good sign, though.
If you have access to another pc, then put your disk in another pc, bearing in mind you may have to change the jumper for either master or slave. If this is your main, c:\, hard disk you will have to jumper it to slave to test in another machine.
As for your hard disk, is this your main c: drive?
Also, when you boot up, go to your bios and see if your bios "sees" the hard disk and let us know. To get into bios you usually press the "delete" button when you are booting up.
There are quite a few utilities around to test your disk but give us the answers to these questions first.
Also, you should really start a new thread, only to make sure others see this and come in and help as im certainly not the best around here, thats for sure, lol.
Also, you havent really told us if your pc boots up or not. I am guessing it doesnt but we arent sure as per what you have posted.
Give us info on that and more info on your pc, age, cpu, motherboard if you can, that sort of info. Is there only one hard drive?
Finally, if you do decide to make your own thread, i wont be notified and i may not see your thread, so you can email or pm me if you want. If not, others will help you out anyway.
You arent done yet, we dont know if your hard disk is kaput or not. We will help you figure that out based on you providing the info needed. And dont forget to give us info on the hard disk itself, the size,mfgr, etc.
thanks