Macbook Pro No longer booting

hello there.

first post, so please be kind if im asking an obvious question

about a month and a half ago, i noticed some "strange" behaviour with my mac. if i had too many applications running, the computer would shut down completely. then, occasionally it would randomly log itself out when i opened garageband. this went away for a while until monday of this week. the first thing i noticed was that the battery indicator was stuck at 100% and said it was plugged in even when it wasn't. it also said to "service battery" but it's been saying that on and off for a while so i took no notice.

anyway, yesterday morning, my computer shut down randomly. then when i tried to boot it, it went to the grey apple screen, and i got the grey spinning wheel, and then i got this small long rectangle shape with rounded edges appear at the bottom of the screen. then the computer would just shut off.

i booted from the cd and ran disk utilities, tried repair disk and it said disk utility cant repair this disk. back up as many files as you can, re-format the disk and restore your backed up files.

now, me being incredibly stupid, i haven't backed up my computer in AGES, and there's alot of very important files on my laptop that i need soon. im not in a position to need a new laptop yet, so im wondering what exactly i should do to get this repaired. do you think doing an upgrade install of lion will fix the issue?

now, me being incredibly stupid, i haven't backed up my computer in AGES, and there's alot of very important files on my laptop that i need soon. im not in a position to need a new laptop yet, so im wondering what exactly i should do to get this repaired. do you think doing an upgrade install of lion will fix the issue?

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No, an upgrade install of Lion will likely cause you to lose all your data if the hard drive is acting up - and it appears yours is.

Here is what I recommend: As soon as you can, download data recovery software and use it to extract as much data as you can from the bad hard drive. Data Rescue 3 is very good at extracting data from defective drives but it's $99. However, you can download a trial copy first to test with. It will have to be installed on another Mac and used via Target Disk mode. You don't want any activity at all on the bad hard drive for fear of overwriting data.