I don't know for sure what the soft tick is you seem to be hearing, but it might be the system trying to access the hard drive. I would probably be backing everything up and making an image of my system, just in case.
Do you know if your system has any special configuration, such as a mSATA drive used to speed up the HDD?
The no OS found message probably means the system is looking in the wrong place for the OS, or for some reason it is not readable. Have you tried running Chkdsk on the drive yet?
You might also run a System File Check by opening an Administrative command prompt and using the command
SFC /scannow
and let us know if it finishes without error. There is a chance of an error showing even though nothing is wrong with your system files because of one file I have seen, so don't panic is it shows problems.