Macbook just starts to white screen with Apple logo and spinning gear(osx lion)

Hi I'm urgently looking for help, a life time of memories are trapped on my Mac that I can't get into. I turned On my Mac book and it went to regular boot screen (white background with apple logo and a spinning gear) but does nothing from there, I've tried to boot in verbose but it just goes one endless for hours and hours on end I've tried to reset the pram, it won't boot into safe mode and holding down the alt at boot just bring me to a hard drive sign with a square around it and and arrow underneath pointing upwards at it(pressing it sends me back to where we started) for some reason also it won't boot into OS X utilities as well most other startup prompts, someone's help would be greatly appreciated, thank soo much