Macbook freezes at boot; CD drive making grinding noises

Long time reader of macforums, first time caller! Here's my situation:

I have a friend (no, not me) with a lemon of a macbook running OS X that experiences the following issues on startup. After showing the grey screen at boot for a few seconds, it displays the apple logo with the loading circle for an inordinate amount of time, and when lucky, switches to a plain blue screen, and much later, reaches the desktop picture with an odd black frame around it, yet never successfully reaches a user interface. Mercifully, he has a time capsule with valid backup points, but here's where it gets strange. I tried all of the following to no avail:

1) Attempted to net restore from the time capsule by connecting it via ethernet. It flashes the globe for a bit but then just goes to the apple with loading circle.
2) Attempted to boot from an OS X CD but when I hold C down, the drive makes a loud grinding sound, twice, before ignoring the command and going to the apple with loading circle.
3) Attempted to clear the RAM cache. Command seemingly went ignored.
4) Used the hardware check utility via the OS X CD, which it passed.
5) Attempted to boot in safe mode. Command went ignored.
6) Made sure it was recognizing the native hard drive by alt booting to select a boot volume--it was there.

I'm at a loss! Before I recommend he take it in to an apple store, I wanted to see if there are any known fixes. Thanks in advance for your time!

Did u reset the PRAM - Start MacBookPro by pressing power button;
and hold down Command Option P and R buttons at same time and hold until you have heard the start chimes 3 times, then release all buttons and let it boot up.
If no further ahead I would be tempted to do the SMC as well altho it may not be pertinent to your scene - Shutdown MacBookPro non Unibody - guess it is same for MacBook, remove power adaptor, remove battery and then hold the power on button down for 5 secs.
Refit battery connect power adaptor and boot up.
If all is go, do a Battery Calibration in very near future.
To the best of my knowledge the next step after that is the repairer, having just got mine back with a new Logic board.

Yeah, unfortunately I tried both of those solutions already and it was still non-responsive. One thing to note is that when I attempt to boot into safe mode (shift on start up), it will shut down instantly when I hit the power button as opposed to the few seconds it takes to hold down the power to shut down under other cases. Not sure if that's significant or not, but he's taking it to the apple store tomorrow anyways so I guess it doesn't matter... thanks for the reply though, appreciate it!