chirping noise??

purchased my macbook back in september. i ordered online to upgrade to 1 gig of ram and a 80 gig hard drive. i have been experiencing some battery problems lately where, when connceted to the powercord, the battery icon would indicate no battery present and when the powercord was disconnceted from the computer, the entire system would shut down. i talked to apple and they have sent me a new battery that i am waiting on, but this is not my problem.
on one occasion i did not notice that my mac was not recognizing my battery and disconnected it from the powercord and it shut down. when i plugged it back in and turned it on, it was extremely slow to boot up and approximately every 20 seconds or so i would hear a chirping noise comming from one of the drives. now it happenes randomly every so often and i am just wondering if anyone has experienced a problem like this before or has any idea where the noise is comming from or if i should be worried about it. just a note usually when i hear the noise, the screen sorta freezes and the mouse turns into one of those pinwheel looking things but this only lasts for around 10 - 15 seconds...

i had a seagate drive in an external USB 2 enclosure that would make this chirping type sound every random once in a while, i did alot of searching, it wasnt the sound of a dieing drive as i have had it over a year and it is perfect, would love to know what it is as well.

And yes, for me it WAS the harddrive, absolutly.

Now, based on when you said it happens, it slows the comp and pinwheel means the system is trying to read somehting, so it "could" be a bad sector or the head is hitting the platter, but it would make more a scrapping sounds.

use the disk utility to do a scan of the HD make sure it is good.

how would i go about doing this??

yu can go into yout applications / utilities folder and Disk Ultility


this should let you do it, if not boot from your mac OS recovery dvd's and once booted into the menu area go to utilities / disk utility


this should do it, not sure if there is another way as i have onl owned my macbook for a week.