MacbookPro only boots to grey apple screen with spinning thing

My macbook pro boots to the hated gray screen

Things I have tried to fix this include:

-Booting with CMD-R (boots to a grey screen)

-Resetting the PRAM (boots to a grey screen)

-Resetting SMC (boots to a grey screen)

-Booted in target disk mode and repaired the disk. Disk repair was successful but a reboot booted to a grey screen

-Attempted to boot from an install disk but all I get is the grey screen

-Attempted to boot in Safe Mode. This gets about half way and then fails.

-CMD-V on boot shows last posted messages as: SMCREADKEYACTION ERROR SMCREADDATA 8 FAILED

and

considerRebuildOFPRelinkeKernel prebuilt rebuild has expired

-Tried booting to Mavericks Install Pen Drive (same errors in the verbose mode)

-I CAN boot into single user mode

-I suspect i need to run the smc update but i can't get into an os to run it

-Perhaps i've got a firmware bug/virus..

This is a 2008 MacBook Pro A1260 Macbookpro4,1