One day I was on Safari and suddenly, out of nowhere with no notice, my COMPUTER starts lagging up, continued with the little rainbow swirley thing (I hate that thing ) So, i restart my computer using the power button at the top right corner of my keyboard. My computer shuts down successfully, I let it rest just in case if it over heated then I went to turn it back on but when i pressed the power button my computer started buzzing and the screen was a DEEP dark grey and after a minute, instead of the apple symbol showing up (like it's supposed to) a question mark in a folder image appeared and started blinking. Does anyone know how or why this happened? All help would be appreciated .
P.S.: My computer is a two-year-old MacBook Apple computer.First of all, doing a hard shut down like that is not a good idea.... you may have just killed the hard drive by doing that.

The symptoms definitely lean toward a hardware issue (dead hard drive).

The slowness can be related to memory or your hard drive, but based on what you said (CAME back up with a question mark on a folder) means that the system can't find your operating system.

If you have applecare my first recommendation is to bring it in to the apple store, they'll replace the hard drive for you. If you don't, I'd take a look at other hard drive possibilities.

One thing you can try (to get your data off of your mac, if you haven't already backed it up) is to turn it on and while it's booting hold the "T" key.

If your mac then shows a firewire symbol you should be able to hook it up to another computer and copy your needed data off of it. However, this won't work if you hard drive is really completely fried.Thanks for your prompt suggestion, Socrates, your username says it all .

I tried your "T Key" method but unfortunately the question mark in the folder thing-a-maging popped up (its starting to tick me off now )

since I have Apple Care I'll take a stop by the Apple Store, they do everything there

thanks to anybody else who suggests ideas for FIXING my Computer.
Thanks alot,
Lukee4evaOh, I'm so glad to hear you have applecare.

Bring it to apple. They will replace your hard drive for you. The sad part is that you'll LOSE whatever data you didn't back up. The good news it that you'll have a brand new hard drive.