I have a macbook pro 8,1 that is having issues starting up. When I first turn it on, there is a small grey loading bar beneath the apple logo and loading circle. After the loading bar is ~20% done, it disappears. After this, the apple logo remains, and the loading circle continues spinning, but it stays like this for over an hour, until I eventually have to force shut it down.
I cannot boot into safe mode, but I can open up Apple Hardware Test, which after multiple passes has not found any issues (both regular and extended tests)
The DVD drive has had a disk stuck inside of it that cannot be removed, so I can't try to boot off a disk (even if I had one).