Disk utility has been running for over an hour. This is my second attempt to verify and repair HD. I started this process because my MacBook Pro was taking an extraordinary long time to boot up.
Is there another test I can do to see if the HD is OK?
I think you are experiencing a known bug with the "Show details" aspect of live verification of a disk using Disk Utility. Probably the program has successfully completed its tasks with no problems found (notice that the button on the right again says "Verify Disk" instead of "Stop Verify"). But the display does not properly update to show this.
I would start up in recovery mode (command-r at startup) and run Disk Utility from there. That always seems to work properly.
You can tell Apple about this little bug here:
Disk Utility stalls at checking volume bitmap
