Gray screen, spinning wheel and nothing else

Man if it ain't one thing its another lol. just recently bought a early 2009 Mac Pro with 12 GB memory, 4 hard drives (total 8TB) stock graphics board and one superdrive (stock) and one pioneer Blue ray drive installed, the system had been running fine until I rebooted last night. I had added the program pathfinder and it was running fine before rebooting so that is the only thing I can think of that I have added to the system since the last reboot. anyway now all i get is the gray screen with the apple in the center and the spinning wheel near the bottom of the screen. I even tried rebooting holding down the "shift" key and the only difference is I got a hollow bar centered near the bottom along with the apple and spinning wheel above it. it started filling in the center and then half way through it went away and once again I was where I was with all the other attempts to boot the system. Can someone give me an idea of what is causing the problem and some possible solutions.
Thank you
Ed

OK I've tried rebooting using the shift key, no luck same gray screen and spinning wheel
tried booting using the cmd+shift= V keys, nothing at all
then I tried cmd+shift= V to watch what was happening dfuring a safe reboot and it came to the line
unable to open: /var/db/bootcache.playlist: 2 no such file or directory
then nothing. I have also disconnected all usb externals while doing all this.
I'm beginning to think that the new (boot) hard drive is having an issue and am trying to figure out how to boot from an external back up of the boot drive.

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