Macbook Startup issues...

[Jampri]

Hi ya'll. I did a few searches and didn't see anyone with the same issue so here it goes...

My macbook has been working perfectly for about 9 months now. However, I went to turn it on tonight and it got stuck at the gray load up screen. I shut it off and did a reset (control option and power button) and that let it load, however it took a significant amount of time to boot up (about 7-10 minutes) Then, it ran really sluggish for about 10 minutes.

I opened disk utility to see what the deal was and got this error when trying to verify the drive:

Disk Utility stopped verifying “Macintosh HD” because the following error was encountered:

Filesystem verify or repair failed.

and then the log says:
Invalid Node Structure
The Volume Macintosh Hard Drive needs to be repaired
Error: Filesystem verify or repair failed

However, the repair disk button is grayed out and I can't repair.

Can anyone help? Thanks...

EDIT:
The Screen just went blank and now the computer gets stuck on the gray start up screen. I've got an appointment with the so called Mac Geniuses on monday, but if anyone knows how to fix it in the mean time, that would be great...

 

[Jeweller]

Don't mean to be pessimistic but a friend of mine experienced a similar problem with a MacBook that's a little older than yours, and it turned out to be a dead hard drive. Hope that's not the case for you but be prepared for the worst, and please tell me you backed everything up...

 

[Jampri]

Update

Well, I'm typing this from my macbook right now, but not without any trouble. It is running extremely sluggish, and the only way I can get it to go to the startup screen is by reseting the computer and waiting about 20 minutes for the login screen to load. I'm consistently getting the pinwheel of death, and the performance is choppy.

I booted up last night from my leopard disk and ran Disk Utility from there. I clicked repair, and it tried three times and couldn't fix the problem, it said something about an invalid thread count or something like that.

Good news is that I'm still under warranty and this error was nothing of my doing. And I was able to get in right now to get my pictures, music, documents, and third party apps backed up to my external.

The thing that puzzles me is that it worked fine a few hours before I turned it on and noticed the problem yesterday. I just cant figure out why after one shut down something would go corrupt, but I'm not a computer whiz either. Anyone have any ideas?

I'm meeting with the apple genius tomorrow. Hopefully they'll fix this and my discolored keyboard (no cracks... yet...) Don't you hate when something works awesome for nine months and then randomly decides to quit haha?

 

[Jampri]

Fixed...?

Sorry for the double post...

I booted the system up from the Leopard install disk one more time, and ran the disk utility. The repair worked and now it is pretty much back to normal... I'm kinda worried still, a bit frazzled, but it seems to be working like it was last week now. So for anyone that's had the same issue, run Disk Utility repair a time or two, and that may fix it. Thanks!

 

[Jampri]

Fixed... but...

okay... sorry for the triple post.

The computer is working fine now, as stated above. However every once and a while there is some weird hard drive noise. I think I'm still gonna take it in to have them look at it. Could the noise mean that the HD, while fixed is on its last leg?

 

[netnothing]

You can try SMARTReporter to see if the SMART status ok or not.
http://www.corecode.at/smartreporter/

Sounds like you should still take it in though.

-Kevin

 

[Jampri]

Okay. Well, I took it to the Apple store today. Told the genius what happened, what I did to try and fix it, and he replaced the HD with no questions. He also surprised me by telling me that he was going to replace the screen bezel because I had a small crack in that and the discolored wrist area for free also. So my computer should run and nearly look like its brand new. Yay! I think he was kind of took off guard when I told him all the stuff I did to fix it.

I was really surprised at how many iPhones I saw replaced in my time waiting though. But I guess that's a topic for another thread...

Thanks for all your help!