dixiefromkville wrote:
All I know is that anything I try, I get the wheel for about 5 mins
My 13 yr old has been using it lately.
That explains it.
You have a boot hard drive and it's been subjected to shock damage (not supposed to move hard drives while the Mac is on)
What is occuring is the drive is attempting to read from the damaged sectors and place that data on a spare one, so it's showing the spinning wheel in OS X saying it's "waiting".
If it can't find the data it returns nothing back to OS X, which is also appears to be occuring.
Your hard drive is damaged, you will need to drag and drop files to a external storage drive likely one at a time because a group or folder copy will hang on the damaged files.
Do NOT use TimeMachine or any other automated backup, in fact don't connect these drives as those might contain the only non-corrupted copy of your files now and connecting them will cause TimeMachine etc., to update with corruped data.
Once you have what you can get off the machine, take it to Apple to have the drive replaced with a new one and you can reinstall OS X after that.
Good Luck 🙂