Always Shuts down at gray screen with spinning gear

Hi All
I think this may be a serious problem
Macbook was working fine then during downloading an app I got a message 'do you want to shutdown' i clicked cancel but re appeared with same message.
I shut down macbook and restarted and booted up to grey screen with spinning gear then off, the whole macbook switched off. I tried to reboot but everytime it switched off at the same point.
I tried to boot from DVD install disk but done the same, tried booting into safe mode but shut off at about 25% on the loading bar. Have reset everything and tried again but still the same prob.
Replaced the hard drive with a spare which had windows 7 on, still didnt allow me to boot from dvd disk but it stopped at the message ' do you want to start windows in safe mode' along with all the other options. I left it at that screen for about 45 mins and the ,acbook never switched off. So i now figured I may have a bad DVD osx disk, A frien of mine has Mountain lion on usb stick, so i borrowed and booted from the usb, got to the screen with the spinning gear and then....it switched off.
Checked fan while booting and all seems fine.
So my question is why is it shutting down, also why does it not shutdown before the spinning gear screen. It cant be over heating as above i fitted a hdd with win7 on and left it at the prompt for 45 mins.
Many thanks for looking
laurie

Hi Nance,
Welcome to the Discussions.
Put Install Disc 1 in the drive and start while holding down the "c" key. Select Disk Utility from the Installer menu, click on the drive on the left and click on Repair Disk. If it reports errors and repairs, repeat the process until no errors are reported.
Post back the results and any unrepaired error messages.
John

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