Macbook Pro refuses to boot from anything

[slippyjim]

Hi,

Macbook pro A1286
First off I am far from a Mac expert as I work fixing windows machines, but Im trying to fix the is Mac for a friend.

It starts to boot, gets the apple log and the spinny circle then sometimes a blue screen and sometimes a grey screen. I tried everythign I could find on the web, safe mode, scanning the hard drive etc etc but nothing worked, made absolutely no difference whatsoever.

So next I decided to try to format and reinstall, so I took the hard drive out and connected a spare empty drive I had lying around and started up the Internet recovery a progress bar appears and goes across I timer initally counts up then starts counting down then the screen goes grey and just stays like that.

I have also tried a recovery DVD and also converted it to a USB stick but it wont even boot from them - I was pressing C during startup but I just get a folder with a ? flashing on the screen.

Surely with a new hard drive in there it shoudl just install????

Any ideas as to what is wrong?

Thanks

 

[niteflyr]

Could be a failed hard drive cable.

 

[slippyjim]

If it was the hard drive cable then I would expect it to either not load at all or stop loading a bit more randomly. I dont think a faulty cable would cause it to stop in exactly the same way every time????