Macbook slow to boot, slow to work - Spotlight Problem? (External HD)

Hi everyone,
I have a Macbook from 2008 (The first aluminum model I believe, before they got rebranded as Pro). Recently I wanted to backup my pictures from iPhoto and I had an external HD formatted as exFAT. The moment I plugged my external HD in, my macbook started lagging real badly with the color wheel not going away. So I just held the power button until it restarted.
When it rebooted, it was first of all EXTREMELY slow to boot, and then once I logged in to my admin account, I could barely do anything. I tried my one other account on the computer and it was the same story. I noticed that Spotlight was not working, and when I clicked it ( and after 5 minutes it finally popped up), it said indexing, and it would never stop. I restarted a few times and it never stops indexing. From what I gather in Google searches, my macbook tried to index the hard drive when it was plugged in and somehow got stuck in this loop.
I read a few sites on how to disable spotlight completely, but the problem is that the computer is way too slow and unresponsive to do anything of the sort. Terminal can be opened but the commands won't execute. I tried holding shift to start the Mac in safe mode, but the bar moves half an inch and then I just get the little lines around the circle going forever with no bar progress.
If anyone has any suggestions, I would greatly appreciate it. I cannot afford to lose these photos, that is my number one concern. There are MANY documents that I need on the HD too, but the pictures are more important. Please give me some advice, while keeping in mind that my data is my primary concern, a reformat is out of the question.
Thanks kindly,
Z
PS: Not sure what Mac version I am, but I was updated to Snow Leopard and I always let the auto-updater do its thing. Don't even bother asking for activity monitor, way too laggy to open that (I tried, it opens but you can't click anything).

Here's a terminal command: sudo mdutil -i on /
This works well =) This will help spotlight
http://osxdaily.com/2007/02/15/spotlight-wont-work-fix-a-broken-spotlight-menu-w ith-these-troubleshooting-tips/

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