Yea, i would agree, hard drive seems like its about to die.
you said earlier, "sometimes you can hear the hard drive Clicking, " You mentioned you thought the arm was going past limit, probably bouncing between the plates.
I would suggest a new hard drive. Even if its not dead yet, it sounds like it might be going soon. The more you run it the quicker it will die, so probably don't run it too much. I would get a new hd, should be able to find a decently cheap one, I don't know if you need the 60Gbs for a car pc.
If you have the correct tools you can image the data over and it will work without having to reinstall xp, however, this assumes that the data is still good and it doesn't die before or while copying.