Chosen Solution
When booting up, my older macBook Pro 17" will get as far as the gray Apple logo on the screen then go to a white screen and hang. I can restart in safe mode and the replacement hard drive is only a year old. My CD drive will not allow me to use a disk to re-install, it just reads it then spits it out. Is this a logic board problem?
the problem can be the graphics driver, reinstall the OS and check.