Please Help

My late '08 MacBook is having problems. Whenever I open Chrome, I get the beach ball. When I tried using Cmd+Option+Esc, I got a beachball for that window only when it opened. I couldn't switch between Windows when the beachball happened, the system was locking up. I put in my old 160GB hard drive with Leopard on it, and now it's running fine. I can't wipe the old hard drive since I have important stuff. Is the hard drive going bad? I was trying to go through Carbon Copy Cloner to clone it, but I got another lock up. I don't have a 2nd SATA to USB adapter. So here are all my questions:

1) Is my hard drive going bad?
2) Could I take the DVD drive out and put the HDD in there without getting an adapter, just to use to clone the hard drive?

I am currently using Safari on it with no problems. Could it be Chrome's fault?

Turns out it was the hard drive. There was a corrupted part, and something from chrome was there, so it would lock up whenever I opened chrome.

Only thing I lost was things being logged in on Chrome. I almost forgot my school email password.