MacBook Pro Boots to Whitescreen and is Unresponsive

Question

     My MacBook Pro froze and when I booted it back up again I hear the chime and it shows a white screen and that is it. It does not sound like the harddrive is spinning up but I can hear the CD drive initialize.
Things I have tried:
Boot into safe mode (command + r) - it does not boot into safe mode, stays on white screen
Clear PRAM (command+option+p+r) -  it reboots twice as it should but I can never get past the white screen
Checked HDD power connection - appeared to be good
Tried another HDD - still boots to white screen
I read somewhere that the CD drive can take too much power on start up, tried to start up with it having no power - stll boots to white screen
So I am really stuck. Does anyone have any further troubleshooting directions I can try?
Thanks,
Chuck

Answer 1

Chuck,
if you have a Late 2011 model, then you have Mac OS X 10.7.2 or later installed. If booting into Recovery mode used to work, but no longer does, then your diagnosis options have been greatly reduced. Do you have either of the following?
a bootable external disk
access to a FireWire 800 cable and access to a second Mac with a FireWire 800 port
If you have neither of these, and you don’t have Recovery mode available to you, then your only option is to purchase a new SATA disk, install it in your MacBook Pro, and use OS X Internet Recovery to download your MacBook Pro’s original version of Mac OS X from Apple’s servers, then install it on the new disk. Once you’ve initialized your new disk with a new administrative user, run Software Update to get it to Mac OS X 10.7.5; you can then use a SATA-to-USB adapter to connect your old disk externally, and then run Disk Utility to see if your old disk can be repaired.