Hey guys,
It started a few days ago when my MBP beachballed/crashed on a website on firefox. After I forced shut down, firefox would crash on open, so I switched browsers, and that would crash on certain websites. After a few crashes with that, more programs began to start crashing on opening too (things like Twitter, Photoshop).
The speed of the computer seemed fine, until last night where upon a restart, it took 5-10 minutes to boot up and log in. Now it's cripplingly slow, and constantly hanging/freezing. Now I can't open any programs, and the most I can really do is open up a folder which took about 20 minutes. It's also worth mentioning that half of my top bar isn't showing up (where the time and battery power is).
I did an extensive hardware check which came out fine and verified disk/disk permissions with my installation disks and it didn't really change anything.
Searching around the internet leads me to believe it's something to do with the harddrive, and I'd like to back it up before going any further but how would I go about trying to back it up when I can't actually do anything on it?
It doesn't really help that I'm also out of the country and won't be able to get near my external HD for the next couple of days, but any help on what's causing it or advice on how to get around the problem would be really appreciated.
It started a few days ago when my MBP beachballed/crashed on a website on firefox. After I forced shut down, firefox would crash on open, so I switched browsers, and that would crash on certain websites. After a few crashes with that, more programs began to start crashing on opening too (things like Twitter, Photoshop).
The speed of the computer seemed fine, until last night where upon a restart, it took 5-10 minutes to boot up and log in. Now it's cripplingly slow, and constantly hanging/freezing. Now I can't open any programs, and the most I can really do is open up a folder which took about 20 minutes. It's also worth mentioning that half of my top bar isn't showing up (where the time and battery power is).
I did an extensive hardware check which came out fine and verified disk/disk permissions with my installation disks and it didn't really change anything.
Searching around the internet leads me to believe it's something to do with the harddrive, and I'd like to back it up before going any further but how would I go about trying to back it up when I can't actually do anything on it?
It doesn't really help that I'm also out of the country and won't be able to get near my external HD for the next couple of days, but any help on what's causing it or advice on how to get around the problem would be really appreciated.
