Color wheel pops up for minutes on end when trying to perform simple tasks?

Question

Ever since last night, my Macbook Pro (purchased in September of 2009), has been incredibly slow. I noticed it first while trying to browse the web. Out of nowhere, while doing things, like browsing Facebook, that I could normally do easily and without incident, the color wheel/beach ball/rainbow wheel/etc. would appear for what felt like an eternity, and for seemingly no reason whatsoever. Firefox was the only application I had running, and there was nothing excessive being done. After several more instances in the next few minutes, I tried my luck with Safari. Same result. Then, I realized it wasn't  just confined to web browsing. Even trying to open a Finder window would cause the color wheel to come up. Every simple action that used to take mere milliseconds to complete now can take up to 5 minutes to unfreeze. After I finally managed to get my laptop to recognize the external hard drive I plugged in so that I could try and use Time Machine to back up the more than 200 gigabytes that occupy my dying hard drive, the back up failed after an hour. This may or may not be related, as I noticed that the icon for the external hard drive no longer showed on my desktop. I have scanned my computer using a virus scanner obtained from the App Store a year or two ago. Nothing turned up. Finally, I have tried both restarting and shutting down my computer, yet all that that has shown me is that start-up is now a laborous process as well. For the first time, it showed me a loading bar under the gray Apple logo that remained empty for a few minutes, until it finally disappeared entirely and the operating system booted up. My attempt at entering Safe Mode on startup also failed, leaving me with nothing but a white screen that forced me to manually shut down my computer and give up in desperation. I'm planning on taking my Macbook to the Apple Store to see what can be done before irreparable damage is inflicted to my hard drive, because I value many of the files that have been added since my last back up several months ago. If any of you have had similar problems or have any idea what is going on, please let me know. Your help would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks,
Danny

Answer 1

It sounds like either data corruption, malware, bad sectors on the drive (moved it while it's opearating? a no-no) or the drive is possibly failing.
I'll give you a bunch of links and you decide what you want to do.
Apple is just going to charge you to replace the drive and not save your data.
If you want to recover your data and can't fix things yourself, take the machine to a local Mac repair shop as it's rather simple to replace the drive and Apple might not have one for a older SATA using machine aslo they specialize in data recovery efforts also. Apple doesn't.
You also can replace the drive yourself too.
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