Mac wont start help please

[atticus570]

Ok Im gonna start from the beggining and explain everything ive tried so far .

My macbook started running real slow and i was getting the rainbow wheel of death so i restarted my mac. I went down stairs come back and its still on the gray screen with the apple loading wich i thought was unusal because it only takes a minute or two usally.So i let it sit for awhile and played a game.

After a half hour i noticed it was still loading so i was pretty sure something was wrong so i have tried a safe boot by holding shift. and it let me start up but i could not open finder and spotlight search kept giving me quit error.

I also tried the method of restarting while holding crtl ,option, p ,r and it worked the same as in safe mode.

So i figured after all that it was time to whip out the snow leopard disk and try running a permisson repair and all that good stuff i hit repair disk and it ran and said it was fine.

But if I tried to run verify or repair permissions it would just hang at the same spot forever or like an hour.

So last resort was I tried to reinstall mac while perserving my files and it would run for about twenty minutes then give me an error

Cant install mac osx the source files can not be copied

So after giving all this information Im hoping someone on this forum can help me. I think my hdd might be shot but I would like to get some other ideas befor I try a clean reboot and loose all my music and stuff

 

[Dadioh]

Sounds like the hard drive is in its death throws. Get yourself a new one.

Not sure which model of Macbook you have but disk replacement is pretty simple on the white Macbooks and the unibody Macbooks. More of a hassle on the older Macbook Pro's... Hopefully you have a time machine backup.

 

[atticus570]

I have the black macbook from around 06 or 07 , I thought thats what the issue is unfortunately I do not have a time machine back up when i put my install disk in and go to utility it still shows me how many files and how much space is used on the hardrive so im hoping the mac repair place in my town can get the music off of it at least .

 

[atticus570]

I think if I have to get a new hdd I might upgrade the ram too do you know how much ram i can expand on a macbook from that year06, 07 I thought it said on apple you can go 2gb but ive heard other people say 4gb?