My macbook pro 17" won't boot with internal or external

Hi there,
Having some trouble with my 17" Macbook pro. It's the 2009 version.
I was updating some things the other day and, when it restarted, it froze. And, every time after that, it froze.
I figured it was just a hard drive issue and tried to re install snow leopard, but, it wouldn't boot up from the disk.
i began to worry.
I used an external hdd to try and boot, it wouldn't boot.
I tried a different external drive (both of these booted successfully on another macbook) and that did not work either.
I then swapped out the hard drives with the internal hard drive, neither would boot.
It turns on fine, and gets to the white screen with the apple with all of the hard drives, but the spinning wheel never shows up, and nothing else happens.
It just sits there.
I booted in verbose mode and it just hung at the initial report... nothing else happened.
It won't boot in safe mode.
I've reset the pram and the smc.
It seems like a hardware problem, but that's really surprising, as before the problem with the update, it was working fine.
if anyone has any suggestions, I would be most grateful.
thanks in advance.

berayen,
if you have Mac OS X 10.6.8 installed, then OS X Internet Recovery is unavailable to you.
Which model MacBook Pro do you have?

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