Macbook booting up strangely! HD or RAM? Help Please!

I have a 2007 Macbook (black) intel core 2 duo 2.2 with snow leopard.

Last week, I noticed that it takes very long to boot up from a cold start. It starts off normally, but then is stuck at the blue screen (before the option to put in your password) for at least 8 min (not exaggerating). Once it loads to OSX, it works normally. I also have a boot camp partition with xp, and that loads as it always had.

I have tried running every trick I can think of:

Disk utility - repair permissions, repair disk
iDefrag - full online defragmentation
Resetting the PRAM and SMC
Disk Warrior check

I went to the genius bar, but they weren't sure what it was. All the diagnostics checked out. He said it was either the hard drive going, or the macbook suddenly rejecting the 3rd party RAM (that has been working fine for 3 years now). I made a copy of my hard drive on an external and booted from there. It still took as long as it did before.

The apple genius was convinced it was the hard drive failing at the beginning of the drive, but if I made a copy of the hard drive on the external, wouldn't it go somewhat faster?

Is there any way to be certain that its the HDD or RAM?

Thanks in advance guys!

I don't have any spare laptop hard drives or RAM, though. Other than going out and buying one, hoping that it's the one that needs replacing, is there any other way to tell?

Yeah, I tried booting from the install disk and from a copy of the hard drive on an external, and booting always took a long time on the blue screen on any of them. When I tried to boot in safe mode, after the progress bar went through (loading safe mode i'm assuming), it was somewhat faster.

When I did disk repair, there were some errors, but it said it fixed them, and disk permissions differed, but it said it was fixed as well.

If it was a hard drive problem, would the copy of the hard drive on the external have the same problems (due to possibly corrupted HD)?

I have reinstalled Snow leopard (just by double clicking install when I inserted the disk) and I have restored from a previous time machine backup (from at least a month before the problem arose).

To get to the option menu at boot is at normal speed. Just loading OSX from any medium (internal HDD, external HDD w/o internal HDD plugged in, OSX disk) always hangs up on the blue screen, which (from what I recall) should only take a second or two as it is going from the grey screen with apple logo to screen where you type in your password.

OSX works fine once its loaded, as if there is nothing wrong. It's just start up going slow at blue screen and also opening the macbook after it was shut (going to sleep) will stay at a screen thats off and the white standby light that glows in the front just stays on. For waking up the macbook, I usually have to force shutdown, then boot again for 8 min.

So....

I originally had 2x2gb of ddr2 Patriot Ram.

I went out and got a 1gb stick from best buy (PNY)

When I took out the old ram, to put in the 1gb stick, the computer would not boot altogether (screen stayed off and didnt get a startup chime)

I put in a new 1gb stick with an old 2gb one, and it loaded up like it has been (8 min on the blue screen)

Does this show that it's a HDD problem?

So now, I ordered a new HDD, just installed leopard from the disk, and the boot is still taking forever. I am at a loss..

Does anyone have an idea what is going on or how to make my macbook work normally?

Also... (im not sure if this helps explain what is going on) When i installed snow leopard on the new hard drive, it was on the blue screen for a long time, and then I heard the "welcome" video that mac osx plays, but it didnt show it just stayed on the blue screen for a long time. Eventually it changed to show the login options....


Any input would be helpful

Thanks