I am not computer illiterate, but need a step-by-step walk-through...PLEASE!

Last night my laptop which has Windows Vista business, quit responding so I restarted it. After repowering, there was a microsoft startup bar at the bottom of the screen, then it went to a completely black screen with an active white cursor and a small circle showing action in the middle of the screen. I let it sit for awhile and it never did anything so I tried detaching and reattaching the battery and upon repowering I hit F11, and hit the prompt to do a backup, it only got to 2% and the battery died. I plugged in the ac adapter, and let it charge and when I turned it back on, there was a screen saying that the system needed to run a disk check for consistency on C:, and that I could choose to quit but it was highly recommended to do it. So I allowed it to run check disk, and let it sit all night (about 8 hours) and it is still saying that it is checking disk.....What do I do?

What is the exact HP model?

HP has a pretty good interactive support site:

HP Support & Drivers

Your symptoms do indicate a hard drive fault.