reformatting hard drive from SL disk

I did run the Onyx Maintenance App last night before I shut it down and it went through to check some type of SMART "thing" after which it said was OK. Then all this happened this morning. I've done an option reboot before and it had no problem finding the Mac HD. I haven't tried a safe boot yet and will probably do that next. Otherwise, every thing else seems to be working normally. My computer is 4 years old and I have used the sleep function mostly. In the past, this computer has spent long spells in sleep mode without shutting down until this last update of SL when I noticed how long it took to reboot, which didn't seem normal. I'll try the safe boot while the computer is "warmed up".

I did a repair disk with the original Snow Leopard disk and it found the Macintosh disk to be ok. So, I'm thinking that if there are no other issues other than a very slow initial boot up time that there must not be anything wrong with it. Unless of course the HDD itself is going bad in which case, I may as well let it fail since I have a Time Machine back up. I'm not sure I can get a clear shot of the screen once it goes into Verbose mode. Or that it will ever even boot up into it on a cold start. It also goes by quickly and I may not get everything we're looking for. I still haven't done a safe boot yet and it is next. I'll get back and see what I see.

OK, I did the safe boot and all went well. Of course, it was already warmed up and I usually haven't experienced any lag time from restart until it's ready to go, in the past. So, other than that main gripe of an extended boot up from a cold start, I could live with it. So long as things keep working like they should. I am just wondering if it will have some kind of impact should I decide later on to upgrade to Lion? Since it seemed that the last update was when things began to go awry. Then again, I usually put the computer to sleep and lately, since I've been playing around with the recently acquired iPad more, have hardly used the Mac until this all started to happen. One thing I had noticed too was that I sometimes found that the computer had turned itself off after many days of "neglect" in sleep mode, I'm guessing. Maybe that's another sign that the hard drive is failing? I had hoped that I could upgrade it to Lion but without knowing for sure what the "problem" might be, I'd rather not risk it or waste my time and money, or anyone else's. Still, I can try to do a Verbose boot on a cold start to see if it can reveal anything at all. It won't be until perhaps tomorrow though when this thing is stone cold.

I took the computer in to the Mac store and they simply did a clean reformat of the drive with all the latest updates using their own SL OS. Things seem to be working fine but who knows how long it will take to boot up tomorrow morning when it's cold?

It turned out to be my hard drive afterall. May as well answer my own post to help others if they are scratching their heads and have similar symptoms. I replaced the drive with an SSD and it starts up in less than a minute now. The apps are also extremely fast in opening as well. Perhaps someday, all computers will have solid state drives?