MacBook Pro (15", Late 2011) Start-up troubles

Question

I'm having start-up issues with my MacBook Pro. Yesterday night it was working fine and I had no problems at all. I left it to go to sleep as usual, and this morning when I tried to start it up the screen started showing jittering grey pixels and seemed shifted to one side.
After that it shut down and when I tried to restart it I couldn't get past the grey screen after the apple logo and spinning indicator came on. It just stays on the grey screen and after a couple of seconds shuts down again. I ran a hardware diagnostic test and no problems came up. Also, when I try to boot up in safe mode I get the progress bar at the bottom of the grey screen, but after that a blue screen with vertical black lines appears and I have to shut down and restart again. The same happens if I try the recovery option (command-r). I can boot in single-user mode with no problems. Can anyone help me figure out what's going on?

Answer 1

You may have experienced a hardware failure of some kind. Give this a try:
Reinstall Lion, Mountain Lion, or Mavericks without erasing drive
Boot to the Recovery HD:
Restart the computer and after the chime press and hold down the COMMAND and R keys until the menu screen appears. Alternatively, restart the computer and after the chime press and hold down the OPTION key until the boot manager screen appears. Select the Recovery HD and click on the downward pointing arrow button.
Repair
When the recovery menu appears select Disk Utility. After DU loads select your hard drive entry (mfgr.'s ID and drive size) from the the left side list.  In the DU status area you will see an entry for the S.M.A.R.T. status of the hard drive.  If it does not say "Verified" then the hard drive is failing or failed. (SMART status is not reported on external Firewire or USB drives.) If the drive is "Verified" then select your OS X volume from the list on the left (sub-entry below the drive entry,) click on the First Aid tab, then click on the Repair Disk button. If DU reports any errors that have been fixed, then re-run Repair Disk until no errors are reported. If no errors are reported then click on the Repair Permissions button. When the process is completed, then quit DU and return to the main menu.
Reinstall Lion, Mountain Lion, or Mavericks
OS X Mavericks- Reinstall OS X
OS X Mountain Lion- Reinstall OS X
OS X Lion- Reinstall Mac OS X
     Note: You will need an active Internet connection. I suggest using Ethernet
                 if possible because it isthree times faster than wireless.
If this is not possible then you will need to do this:
Install or Reinstall Mavericks, Mountain Lion, or Lion from Scratch
Be sure you backup your files to an external drive or second internal drive because the following procedure will remove everything from the hard drive.
OS X Mavericks- Erase and reinstall OS X
OS X Mountain Lion- Erase and reinstall OS X
OS X Lion- Erase and reinstall Mac OS X
Note: You will need an active Internet connection. I suggest using Ethernet if possible
            because it is three times faster than wireless.