Q: Possible reasons of Internet Recovery not starting?

Hi all,

What could be possible causes of Recovery HD or Internet Recovery mode in OSX not completing startup?

Machine: Macbook pro early 2011, OS: OS X Yosemite 10.10

Situation: Computer could not resume from a suspended state and I had to hard-reboot it. Rebooting goes to a grey screen and stops there. A lot of heat is generated from the processors and fans being run on high speed after a few minutes, so I guess something with the CPU is going on. Tried resetting NVRAM (it is currently empty), resetting SMC, boot into safe mode - all the same, it stops after a while in a grey screen. Verbose mode (CMD+V) does not give anything interesting. Single user mode loads fine. I don't see any special errors in /var/log/system.log or other log files. Where else can I get a clue what is going on?

I ran fsck in single user mode and filesystem is good. Ran repair permissions from single user mode - all went well. I can see my files, so HDD seems fine.

The odd thing is that neither recovery nor Internet recovery finished loading. When I boot with alt+cmd+r into internet recovery - it waits a few minutes to download the tools, then the same grey screen and high fan speed - stuck for 10 minutes and I usually turn it off.

My next step would be to reinstall it from a flash drive but I wonder if it has anything to do with a hardware problem. Has anyone experienced this situation?

Anyone has any ideas why Internet Recovery does not finish loading? What log files could I look at to see why cpu seems to hang and stop the booting process?

Regards,

Victor