White screen grey apple continuous spinning wheel

I have a 2008 MacBook which after starting displays a white screen grey apple and spinning wheel
Have reset  pram
Have tried starting holding option when the hard drive appears on screen I click on it and then the up arrow below it this takes me back to the spinning wheel with apple screen
I don't have the original CDs that came with the machine
Any suggestions

See this Apple note: http://support.apple.com/kb/TS2570
One step has you doing a disk repair using Disk Utility. If you don't have any OS X DVD's to boot from, perhaps you have an external bootable backup to startup and run Disk Utlity.

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