IMac not reading hard drive, spotlight not working, all my files not showing... help!!!

Hi folks,
I got home from a three week trip and turned on my imac, at first i realized it was running extremely slow. Then i plugged in my external hard drive, and it didn't read. I checked in disk utilities and profiler, and my hard drive was there, just not appearing in finder or desktop. I couldn't mount (it was grey) the hard drive in disk utilities either. (I tried with other hard drives, same problem; they all worked before)
Afterwards, I found out that spotlight wasn't working at all, it wasen't even initializing (see attached screenshot). When i opened "all my files", nothing appeared in the window - it was blank. Another thing is, launchpad scares me - it loads incredibly slow and the screen keeps refreshing itself.
Please help!! I don't want to reinstall the whole system and lose all my file, cause right now, I cannot backup anything since it won't read my hard drives!! Could this be some kind of apple-virus..
Anyone else with a similar situation? My system is 10.7.5, processor: i3

This is not related to any kind of malware.
It sounds like something is going very wrong with your machine, but I'm unsure what that might be that would prevent all external hard drives from working. Are you able to start up in recovery mode (hold down command-R at startup)? If so, from recovery mode, open Disk Utility and select your internal hard drive. What does the SMART Status say?

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