Won't boot past the Apple logo...

I have an '07 MacBook that was upgraded to Snow Leopard about 6 months ago. I've had it for about 3.5 years with no problems-- until now. Last night I turned it on and it booted fine. However, once it had booted, the spinning pinwheel would not go away when I was on "Finder". Despite this, Firefox loaded up fine. But I didn't want to do stuff on the computer when I knew something wasn't right. I tried to restart it, but it wouldn't shut down, so I was forced to cut it off with the power button. When i tried to turn it back on, it wouldn't get passed the white screen with the Apple logo and the little spinning load signal. Along with that, a load bar that I have never seen on that page before began to load up, but it disappeared after filling up to about 10%. I let it sit for a while before turning it off and trying again. By this point I was freaking out, because I have some valuable documents/files that I haven't backed up yet that I really need. I got on my sister's computer and began to research all the topics where people had the same problem. I did everything. I tried the verbose mode, but everything seemed to be okay. In verbose, I did the fsck -fy and reboot, but it still wouldn't start. I did the PRAM and SMC resets. I tried to open it in Safe Mode, but I couldn't get it to open. This morning, I got out my Snow Leopard disc and was able to boot that up. Unfortunately, I, stupidly, have not used time machine to back anything up like I should. I don't want to just wipe and restart everything because there are some files I really need to get. I'm trying disc utility. When I verify the disc, it says that the Sibling Link is invalid and it can't repair that. It tells me to back up as much as I can and then to wipe it and start over, but I don't know how to back stuff up from here. I've also tried "Permission Verify". It comes up with all this things that say either "Group differs on..." or "Permissions differ on..." and then it goes on with a long line of text starting with "Applications/Utilities/....etc. etc." and they all end with either "should be 0, group is 80(or 90)" or "should be -rw-r--r--, they are "-rw-rw-r--". But before it finishes verifying them, it stops loading with about a minute left and pretty much just freezes other than the mouse being moveable.
I'm out of town right now, but I'm probably just going to take it in to the local Mac store when I get home since there's not one around here. Of course, if this is something that I can fix, I'd prefer just to do that. Someone please put me out of my misery and tell me that my files are recoverable. When I'm in disc utility, it says I have the exact capacity I had when my computer was booting, so that gives me hope that all of my files are still there, not to mention the fact that I could see them in another program under "Utilities". Unfortunately though, I'm not computer-savy enough to know what to do. Sorry for all this writing, but hopefully this way all you tech-wizards' questions will be answered so that you know how best to help me.

Yes, I'm using my snow leopard DVD. I wrote all of this in my first post. I tried to boot safe mode from Terminal by doing the "sudo nvram boot-args="-x"" thing. Also in my first post, I said that i used Disc Utility and that it told me the Sibling link was missing or was wrong. Read my first post and you'll see everything that I've tried.
Also, an update on something, now when I upload in Verbose mode, it tells me the bugs; it didn't do that before.

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