2009 MacBook pro unusual slow and keeps crashing

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Today my MacBook has started to freeze whenever I try to do anything whatsoever and needed to be restarted to get it sorted, it's taking 5 reboots to get to a point where I can even enter my password to login.

The only software that's. Hanged recently Is that I've upgraded to mountain lion. Ive turned it off for a while to let it cool down and stop me from throwing it at the wall.

Does anyone know where I should even start to try to repair this fault, any help greatly appreciated.
 
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Mac Mini Core i7 2012 | White 2009 MacBook 2 Ghz | 733 Mhz G4 Quicksilver
Firstly tell us how much RAM and free hard disk space you have.
 
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Mac Mini Core i7 2012 | White 2009 MacBook 2 Ghz | 733 Mhz G4 Quicksilver
Has Spotlight finished updating yet, the magnifying glass in the top right of the menu bar
 
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I installed mountain lion the day it came out, could spotlight still be updating and how can I tell?
 

chscag

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2017 27" iMac, 10.5" iPad Pro, iPhone 8, iPhone 11, iPhone 12 Mini, Numerous iPods, Monterey
Click on the small magnifying glass in the upper right corner of your top menu. If the word "indexing" shows up, it's still busy updating.
 
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It won't even boot up now, it's been at that stupid loading screen for about 20 minutes. It told me that I needed to service the battery the other day, could this be causing a problem?
 

chscag

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It won't even boot up now, it's been at that stupid loading screen for about 20 minutes. It told me that I needed to service the battery the other day, could this be causing a problem?

Yes, it's possible. If the battery is removable, try removing it and see if the machine will boot without the battery.
 
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It's the one where the batteries inside the unit and you need to take off the plastic tray, are those removable? I just ran a quick hardware test using the disk that came with it and it said no errors found
 

chscag

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Yes, you should be able to remove that battery although you may need a special driver to unfasten the "non tamper" screws. Since I'm not sure which model you have, go to iFixit: The free repair manual and look up their instructions for removing the battery from your particular model MBP. The Apple Hardware Test in most cases won't flag a bad battery but the system will.
 
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It booted properly this morning and spotlight said that it was indexing so I waited till it had finished but it's frozen again when I tried to open safari. The battery's still saying it needs servicing so is that still the likely problem?
 
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I got battery out and it still wouldn't boot up at all, I used that diagnostic program again and it says that the battery is charging to 12.55 volts, I'm running an extended diagnostic test now to see what it flags up
 
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I've managed to access the recovery partition, it seems to think that the hard disk is corrupted and can't repair it but can't format it either because the program doesn't recognise the existence of the main hard drive
 

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