MacBook Pro very, very slow, 20 hours to open in safe mode

Question

I realize this is for the Macpro but the Macbook Pro site has way to 
much spam on it and I was wondering if somebody on this list could 
help me.
I have a Macbook pro, intel  core 2    120 hard drive with 2 GB ram. 
I think the 2.2 but not positive. I didn't want to wait a hour to 
open about this MAC, operating 10.5 it was left on overnight, when I 
got up in morning, I continued listening to Itunes.  It would play 
about 3 seconds of a song, pause for 5 or 6 seconds and then play 
another 2 or three.  I started to do a reboot and everything has 
slowed down to the point of clicking to open a folder, it will take 
10-15 minutes to open.
I finally got about everything that was open closed, and then forced 
it quit using the apple, esc. and then held the power key down.
Upon rebooting all I had was the gong then spinning wheel, after a 
few hours of this, I rebooted with install disk, ran dish utility.  
It said the repair disk was OK and then repaired a few permissions.
I quit DU and then rebooted, gong, spinning wheel for hours.
I then rebooted with tech tool deluxe, and ran everything.  
Everything checked out except 8 errors on surface scan.
I was able to run disk warrior and it rebuilt it, but still same 
problem.  It almost acts like the hard drive is operating at a 1/10 
of the speed it should be.
I can startup in safe mode which will take approximately 20 hours.
Any help appreciated.
Bob

Answer 1

rstief wrote:
Well I guess I am a little disappointed in this group.  I can't believe that I am the only person who has had this problem.
Anybody got anything besides replace replace a hard drive that disk utility says is good.
I gave you a link with a huge amount of advice to fix anything with a Mac just about (still need Firewire Target Disk mode though, getting to it. )
Get a copy of your data off using a storage drive, and perform a
Restoring OS X 10.5 10.6. 10.7 - simple overwrite OS method
or a
Restoring OS X - 10.6  "fresh install method"
Works just about the same for 10.5, same process
If you have a Intel Mac you should consider 10.6, as it strips out the PPC code and introduces faster video drivers, you'll see a nice snappy increase.
While your at it you may as well get a new hard drive too, that one is rather limted (only 120GB) and old, it's likely dying, even though it checks out. This is typical of a dying drive, it gets slow and acts strange.
You can breathe new life into that machine, download the Free MacTracker, look up how much RAM it can hold and beef it up along with a new hard drive, install 10.6 and you'll have a new machine again.
It's all here, read. We can't crawl through the lines and fix your machine, only guide you to fixing it yourself.
https://discussions.apple.com/message/16276201#16276201