Help my mac won't respond once booted

[mashinhead]

I have a first gen 13 inch MacBook aluminum. It was dropped on the corner a few months ago but has preformed fine ever since. I have been using it up until yesterday without a problem. Although yesterday I noticed the airport wireless icon was reporting and exclamation point icon and it was having trouble finding and connecting to networks my iPhone was connecting o without a problem. Today I boot up and the boot time is very slow and sometimes hangs. It takes 10 minutes to get to the login screen and when it does I can move the mouse but the keyboard won't respond. So I can't type my password to login. The mouse moves but when I click a button nothing happens. I booted I safe mode and off the os x disk with the same issue. However I used key commands to do that and selected a boot disk using the keyboard and the mouse to do that so I know the work. Has anyone experienced this or have any suggestions. Can I bypass my loginscreen somehow? I'm most concerned about my data and I plane to get a hard drive first thing tomorrow.

 

[milton.sheaf]

Don't be concerned about your data. You can always restore your data from back-up. You DO make regular back-ups of your data, yes? If not - data loss is your own fault. 2.5" external disks are very cheap, and Carbon Copy Cloner is "free". There's absolutely no excuse for not backing up your data.

As for your laptop, an easy way to see if it's hardware damage or software corruption is to reinstall OSX. Use the "Archive and Install" method from the options screen in the installer. (All your programs and user data will be preserved). That will fix it assuming it's a software glitch. If that doesn't fix the problem, well, you've got faulty hardware then.