Hanging at logo / wheel – need help fixing system files

So you know how sometimes you read a post and it reminds you of the theory of natural selection? Here's one. Please save me.

I deleted the private/var/vm swapfile and sleepimage files and cannot boot my computer. I did this because I wanted to make an image of my hard drive small enough to fit on a USB to, hold your laughter, avoid disasters. Last time I had to get my boot disk back from Time Machine I had difficulties, so I wanted to make sure I had a failsafe backup. Because of 16 gigs of ram that sleepimage is rather large. It was a dumb, exhausted decision.

I have 1.5 TB of video and photo files, and somehow in organizing all my drives to backup onto my 2TB Time machine weeks ago, I didn't include my boot drive. I just realized this mistake last night.

Symptoms:

I could not boot from the internal drive. It hung at the spinning wheel. I cannot boot into safe mode, either. Safe mode loads, but I get the "your computer rebooted because of an error" message. I can option-s into other drives, so i installed OSX on a clean external drive to write this. What is odd, however, is that when I turn off and reboot off this clean install, I get the error reboot message again, even though this is an external drive. I've reinstalled OSX twice now on the external drive.

I followed instructions here:
http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20100430074737AAceNRJ

I checked permissions, repair disk on all disks, rebooted, then rechecked. When I went into disk utility from an external drive, I could not select "repair permissions" on my internal boot drive (greyed out option). I have ML install on a USB. So, I decided to install Mountain Lion on my internal drive again without deleting my partition.

This didn't restore files in any way.

Now, my drive does not hang, but instead goes straight to the boot error message, cycles, ad nauseam.

I recovered all my files off the internal drive, but am wondering now that even if I reinstall over it, there is another problem with my computer because the external now also does not run after reboot. Since I'm using the computer fine now from the external, I assume memory and logic board are okay.

I figured I'd ask here and wait a day before reinstalling. If anyone has suggestions that might save me installing all my preferences and programs (migration assistant does not get all of it), or opinions on my intelligence, I would greatly appreciate it.

System:
june 2012 macbook pro non-retina 2.3 i7, refurbished
16 GB ram
2 Samsung 830 SSDs (I used the OWC kit to pull out my DVD drive)
currently running off an external clean install USB boot

If I missed anything let me know.

julian

A simpler problem:

Anytime I reinstall ML on an internal or external drive, it runs. As soon as I reboot, I get the bootup error message. This is regardless of if the drive is internal or external. When booting from an external drive, I also cannot unmount the internal drive to repair any errors.

I'm baffled about why am I getting the error message when booting from an external drive. Could it be there is something wrong with my board? ㅜㅜ

I got a call yesterday from a client who needs something by the end of the week so I have to at least get Lightroom running. Going to try that now on the system before I reboot.

Thank you for your help!

I posted this elsewhere in case anybody can help~

http://www.mac-forums.com/forums/os-x-operating-system/293519-your-computer-restarted-because-problem.html#post1488158

I posted a YouTube video of how ridiculous this situation has become, lol. thank you if you have any tips!

I thought I'd post an update in case it can help anyone in the future with similar issues.

My 16gb of OWC memory passed memtest and apple's hardware test, but after switching the memory out, my machine booted right up. I had no memory problems with the machine running, but as as I rebooted the memory failed.

My machine runs now with the 4 gigs of RAM the machine came with, however the boot drive does not show up in finder. I can search it, and it shows up in disk utility, but it's just not showing up in finder for whatever reason, even after putting on an image of my old OS. Will take out my data doubler and see what happens next.