So turns out there have been a lot of hard drive failures from the run of hard drives they were installing when I got my new one. I thought I was just cursed, turns out Mac made a mistake for plenty more.

Anyway, after about 3 hours of research I found a temporary fix that should be good enough to keep working until this storm ends and I can make it to a mac store. Hopefully someone finds this useful.

So for search engine sake: My computer was booting to the grey screen with a ticking noise and not going beyond that. Also before that happened the computer wasn't reading the wireless card as being installed and I was able to run disk utility before it quit booting all the way.

So after said research I found this on mac-forums.com

Reboot holding down the Apple and "s" key to reboot in single user mode.

Once a bunch of text loads, type fsck -fy
Now press return. A ton of stuff shows up and it repairs what it can. It says to type reboot and it should reboot. Mine did not and I had to do a hard restart. But, after the hard restart and a very prolonged blue screen, the hard drive made a comeback. Given, finder is taking its dear sweet time to do everything, but all the rest of the apps seem to be doing fine once opened. Also after a few restarts, everything just takes significantly longer. But alas, computer works.

Apple is doing me the courtesy in extending my 90 day warranty. Apparently I am allowed to bring in my computer as soon as I get the next chance which may not be until thursday next week. From what I have read though, people have done the fsck -fy thing for weeks before really needing to get a new hard drive. At least this happened this week and not next week, otherwise I would be researching on Newegg and making an attempt at it myself.