MacBook not loading properly

[crazymaca69]

Hi guys,
I'm having a problem with my MacBook. When I power up it takes about ten minutes to load when it finally does everything is very very slow the normal taskbar at the top right is missing apart from the spotlight and a third party program I have running. No clock, wifi etc as per normal. I tried connecting my external hard drive to run a backup but it doesn't recognise the USB or FireWire ports I've tried putting the leopard disk in to run disk utility but it ejects the disk after a couple of attempts of loading. Has anyone got any ideas of how to fix this?

[crazymaca69]

anybody at all?

[DeltaMac]

My first guess is a failing hard drive.
Try this:
Shut your MacBook OFF
Then, power on while holding the Option key.
when you get the light grey screen, which should have an icon for your hard drive, then insert your Leopard installer DVD.
You should get an icon on the screen for that Leopard DVD. Tab over to select that DVD, then press Enter, or Return.
You should boot to the installer, so click forward a screen or two.

Run Disk Utility from the Utilities menu.
Select your hard drive, and click the Repair Disk button (different from Repair Disk Permissions).
If anything is repaired, run the same Repair again, until you see no problems found.
If the Repair finds problems that it won't fix, or you can't get to that point at all, come back here, (which I expect )

[djackmac]

Try a safe boot. Boot by holding the shift key. Keep holding it until you reach a login screen. If you get to that point log in and go to desktop. If everything seems fine then, reboot normally to see how it acts.