Horizontal progress bar (grey) with a circular loading animation on top of the bar.. Look @ the attached pic.. And YES i did hold the power button! However, why would Disk Utility be telling me then that there's some disk errors? Hold on let me try playing around and trying to turn off the Mac without holding the power button for long..
Maybe because there ARE disk errors?!?
Honestly, I don't understand why you are skeptical of the HD being defective.