Macbook won't boot

[j.dirona]

So I have a friend who is having trouble with her macbook (2010), I've had it for the day and here are the problems I see,

 

On start up it will show the apple logo but then stay on the white screen (w/o the logo)

Using safe boot causes it to either go to the white screen or the grey screen (sometimes one and then the other)

Entering the firmware by pressing cmd+option+O+F causes the white screen to appear

 

Previous to this starting chrome had begun to run really slowly,

 

I'm not sure whats wrong... is this a virus of some type? does anybody else know what might be wrong?

Also is it possible to boot a macbook with a OS off of a USB instead?

[Lotus]

1 of 2 things: either a bad HDD (relatively easy fix, but you lose all your data), or your MoBo is dying/dead (the computer is worthless and dead). The slowdown issues before this happening point to the former, but it sounds like you're having apple's version of not being able to get to BIOS, which points to the latter.

[Redheadsrule13]

First things first, try removing the battery then holding the power button for a few seconds, makes sure all the power is drained. Otherwise the only thing I can think of is to set up a hackintosh partition on another drive, then try and boot to it instead. Even try booting with no drive and see what happens. Just experiment I guess.