My MacBook Pro will not boot up past the Apple screen, not in Safe mode, not with original OS X install DVD ! Please help ! :-) Mid-2010 13-inch MacBook Pro, Intel Core Duo, using OS X 10.8

Hello everybody ! I am in trouble and would greatly appreciate any help ! I am a Swiss guy living in a small town of southwest China, thousands of miles away from the nearest Genius Bar…

With my Macbook Pro plugged in, I was downloading an updated version of Skype while doing some routine task at the same time (probably email) and the whole system froze. Keyboard dead. I waited for a while, disconnected ethernet and did a hard shutdown with the power button. Waited a couple of minutes and restarted. Since then…

The Mac powers up but booting freezes half-way ! First chimes OK, startup screen appears with Apple logo and progress indicator spinning for about 1.5 minutes. Then stops spinning. Waiting a long time brings no change. Only way out is a hard shutdown again.

I looked in my OS X book and in Apple support group discussions, then tried a few things (with the Mac plugged in; FileVault is not enabled) :

- Safe mode boot : also gets stuck the same way

- Booting with the original OS X install DVD (10.6.3, about 2.5 year older than the OS X 10.8 version that I am using on the Mac) --> gives me the same startup screen with Apple logo and spinning indicator but, after a while both disappear, leaving an empty screen while the DVD is still making noises. After another while, DVD stops running. That's it.

- Console mode : boots OK, then did a check disk while in console mode, --> "HD appears OK" ! But when I type "reboot" to exit console mode and boot with OS X, it goes through exactly the same problem as above: chimes, indicator spinning then freezes.

- Verbose mode boot: everything goes well for a while, then it gets stuck at : "SMC::smcReadKeyAction ERROR : smcReadDATA8 failed for key MOTP (kSMCKeyNotFound)"

- NVRAM reset ( Command (⌘), Option, P, and R at startup) : the second chimes comes alright but then booting gets stuck like all other attempts.

- Apple Hardware Test with the original Apple DVD : the test boots OK; I did both short and extended memory tests : both cases report one error with code 4SNS/1/40000001:TN1D--18.000

- Since some of these tests were made on day two, I suppose that SMC was reset, but that did not change anything.

This Mac is my workhorse... Many, many THANKS for trying to help !

Lao Bo (that's my Chinese name :-)