MBA shuts off after attempting to boot in safe mode.

I've had my 2012 MBA for almost a year now, but yesterday it did something it has never done before. It shut down on its own and when I powered it back up again, it attempted to boot in safe mode (it no longer boots normally). The progress bar reached all the way to the end, but shuts off immediately after. I have ran the disk utility and there were no problems. I have also tried reinstalling mountain lion 10.8, but when it asks me to select the disk I want to install it on, the screen freezes when I enter my password. I have no idea what else to do. Any help would be appreciated!

If you want to preserve the data on the boot drive, you must try to back up now, before you do anything else. It may or may not be possible. If you don't care about the data, you can skip this step.
There are several ways to back up a Mac that is not fully functional. You need an external hard drive to hold the backup data.
1. Boot from the Recovery partition or from a local Time Machine backup volume (option key at startup.) Launch Disk Utility and follow the instructions in this support article, under “Instructions for backing up to an external hard disk via Disk Utility.”
2. If you have access to a working Mac, and both it and the non-working Mac have FireWire or Thunderbolt ports, boot the non-working Mac in target disk mode. Use the working Mac to copy the data to another drive. This technique won't work with USB, Ethernet, Wi-Fi, or Bluetooth.
3. If the internal drive of the non-working Mac is user-replaceable, remove it and mount it in an external enclosure or drive dock. Use another Mac to copy the data.

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