Major problems with HD, can't back up, can't repair, can't verify...
Hello,
So I'm having some really scary problems completely out of the blue yesterday on my Macbook running 10.5.8 I noticed it was kind of slower than normal all day using it, and then while visiting some snowboard website, the beach ball of death comes on. I figure, no big deal, it's just bogged down for whatever reason and will take a bit of time to come back on. But after about 2-3 mins nothing! Try to go to desktop to force quite Firefox, and it won't even let me do that. I had to shut the laptop down. Then upon restart I just get to the grey Apple logo screen, and then the never ending spinning wheel. So I tried booting off of my original OS X install disc 1 and get into Disc Utility. I was going to make a backup of the drive from restore. But first I thought I should verify and repair the HD disk. This is the error code I keep getting every single time I try to verify: First Aid Failed, Disk Utility stopped verifying "Macintosh HD" because the following error was encountered: Filesystem verify or repair failed. Then in red in the box below it says:
Invalid node structure
Volume check failed
Error: Filesystem verify or repair failed.
Then same thing when I try to repair disk. I tried to make a new image of the drive onto my brand new backup drive, and it won't let me, gives me some error. Same thing when trying to go into restore. I can sometimes select the Macintosh HD and drag it into the first drive slot, but then it will not let me select any drive to put as the destination drive. I'm freaking out. I have a ton of important stuff on my laptop and can't afford to loose it. Hence the reason I just got a backup drive as a gift for christmas. Is there anything or any way to get my info off of my HD and onto the new backup, and then just restore the whole OS X? I know I can probably just erase the drive and re install, but I can't afford to loose all my info and stuff. Any help would be very much appreciate as I am starting to really freak out and CAN NOT afford to pay for a company to salvage my HD. I don't even know if I can afford to buy that $99 Warrior Drive software everyone keeps talking about. Thank you for your help in advance, I will be checking in on this often.