Sounds like the HDD may be dieing, in which case there is nothing that can be done to "save" it, only your data if you still have some on there.
Since you don't have anything installed you should boot the UBCD and run one of the manufacturers SMART long tests on it:
http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/
Or if you can't burn it, most live CDs should have smartctl installed, and you can run 'smartctl -t long /dev/sda'.
Then you wait for it to finish and check the attributes with 'smartctl -a /dev/sda'.