The screen stays on the apple icon when i start up!!!!!!!!!!!!

....for some reason..when i press the power button...the laptop makes a loud fan kind of noise...eventually the screen will light up and the apple icon will appear...whats weird is that the icon moves down from its original position slighty..its almost not noticeable but with all the restarting ive been doing its become more apparent....after that...its a pretty much a backlit preview of the apple icon. When i try to use the Mac OSX install disc to run the hardware tests (quick or/and extended) ...it comes up with no diagnostic problem....
Ive also tried holding down the option key as i turn the power on and when i choose the the HD icon and press on the right arrow icon ...the apple icon comes up again..and then in a few miliseconds the applen icon changes to a small circle with a line through it...kind of like a barred symbol ..(similar to when an ipod is connected and it tells you not to disconnect)...i have a feeling it may have been a file in prefs or reciepts that i shouldve not erased...
Is there anyway at all to salvage what i have on HD?..and what can i do ..as its so frustrating knowing ive just upgraded my Pro-Tools with so many plug-ins i havent got to use yet....
any help and advice would be appreciated
Joshua

I thought I would add more to my story in case it triggered someone's memory. The thing that brought me to this thread is that the screen icon did that little hitch thing then stops. It moves about 1/4 inch to the right then gets something like artifacts on the top and left edge. Other things I have tried: booting into target mode, running disk verify, which is fine, disk repair won't work because it won't unmount, booting from the apple hardware cd, which only gets me into open firmware, it won't run the program, reset the open firmware and vram to defaults. The part that almost disturbs me most is that I couldn't get the OS install discs to run, it just gave me a circle with a line across it, and that I had to format the drive while in target disc mode, then install the same way. It rebooted after the install and showed the "bad" computers desktop on the main machine just fine. I just don't get it.

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