Macbook boot problem

I have a black macbook that wont start up.
It worked fine before and now when i start it up it goes to the gray screen the the gear just spins for a long time(i.e. a few minutes) sometimes it goes to the mac startup bar and it takes a long time too(i.e. 1-2 minutes) for it to go the the login screen. Then if i get to the login i login and it just freezes and it might go to a black screen where it looks like the command prompt screen from Windows.

P.S. i have resetting the PRAM and the PMU and tried to boot it without the battery.
Any other suggestions?

Try this article:

Resolve startup issues and perform disk maintenance with Disk Utility and fsck

by booting from disc like it said in the article, will i lose my data on the hdd?

steel_magnum said:

by booting from disc like it said in the article, will i lose my data on the hdd?

Click to expand...

No, not if you follow the directions. While your drive may be on it's last leg and you may have already lost data, any data loss would not be caused by any of the steps contained in that article.