MacBook pro freezes at start up

My MacBook pro freezes at start up at the gray screen w/ spinning gear.
I did a firmware update yesterday and this happened upon restart.
MacBook pro purchased new early 2011 lion

You need to back up your data before you do anything else, if it's still possible.
There are several ways to back up a Mac that is unable to fully boot. You need an external hard drive to hold the backup data.
1. Boot from your recovery partition (10.7 or later), a local Time Machine backup volume (10.7.2 or later), or your installation disc (10.6.8 or earlier.) Launch Disk Utility and follow the instructions in the support article linked below, under “Instructions for backing up to an external hard disk via Disk Utility.”
How to back up and restore your files
2. If you have a working Mac, and both it and the non-working Mac have FireWire ports, boot the non-working Mac in target disk mode by holding down the key combination command-T at the startup chime. Connect the two Macs with a FireWire cable. The internal drive of the machine running in target mode will mount as an external drive on the other machine. Copy the data to another drive.
How to use and troubleshoot FireWire target disk mode
3. If the internal drive of the non-working Mac is user-replaceable, remove it and mount it in an external enclosure or drive dock. Use another Mac to copy the data.

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  • My MacBook pro freezes during start up after 30 secs. Any ideas?

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  • Macbook pro freezing and start up problems

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  • MacBook pro freezes on start up

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    https://support.apple.com/kb/HT1455
    https://support.apple.com/kb/HT1564
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    If you have more than one user account, these instructions must be carried out as an administrator. I've tested them only with the Safari web browser. If you use another browser, they may not work as described.
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  • Macbook pro freezes on start up with blue screen

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      DALE

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    Message was edited by: S.U.

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  • TS3423 My MacBook Pro freezes on the blue start up screen. What can I do?

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    Try running an Apple hardware Test:
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