Has anyone exoerienced upon startup the Grey Screen with the Apple Logo, Spinning Gear and a Progress Bar? This is a sudden issue which just started and delays my startup to 4/5 minutes. My system worked fine till recently when this issue appeared: MacMini 2009(late) OSX(Lion)!
Info:Mac mini, Mac OS X (10.7.3), 128GB SSD, Data Doubler 750GB Drive
My MacBook Pro (The oldest one, I believe) won't start. After OS X 10.6.5, it will sit at the grey screen with the spinning gear. Safe boot does the same. Verbose mode shows it stuck at "vmnet: netif-vmnet8: Adding protocol 2." I can boot off the install CD and single user mode
I have a 1.83 Ghz MBP with 512 mb of RAM (lame I know). The other day someone was using my computer to burn a CD on iTunes when all of my programs began failing. On instinct I rebooted my computer to solve the problem. Alas, now I cant boot past the grey apple screen, and the gear is spinning away. Saddest part of the story is that I had time set aside to back up my computer the day after this happened . Anyway what is the best thing to do from here? I haven't made any moves to fix it yet really, so what is the best thing that I can do to try and get my files back?
Information: MacBook Pro Mac OS X (10.4.10) Grey Screen, Spinning Gear
I have a Mac Mini that my sister gave me because she said it stopped working. She said she wanted me to get all her photos off of it. Its a Model A1176 1.66/2X512/80/COMBO/AP/BT I tried playing with it and it powers up, shows the Apple on a grey screen with a spinning little icon.. It does that for about 30 sec and then turns off. I opened it up, took the hard drive out, put it into an external USB case and hooked it up to my Windows PC and loaded MacDrive 8 software. Got the drive to be recognized on the PC and backed up all her photos.
My intel mini (2008, I think) won't boot. I ran Disk Utility and then Disk Warrior from my Macbook Pro, then I tried single-user mode. Everything came back "OK" but it still won't boot. It gets to the Apple logo with the spinning gear, spins 1-2 times, then freezes. It just sits, frozen, until I hold the power button and force it to turn off.
My 4 month old Macbook Pro suddenly shuts down with a blue screen and a spinning gear(like on the start-up) thats lasts for like 10 seconds. Could you suggest anything I can do? I've already tried resetting PRAM, SMC, ran in safe mode, and repaired permissions but nothing works!The last thing i remembered doing before this happened was a 7-pass Free Space Erase.
I have an iMac G5 stuck on the gray screen with spinning gear. I woke up to it being stuck on a blue screen, then force quit and now it's stuck on gray with spinning gear.
I started this topic on the Garage Band forum because I was having trouble with Garage Band '08 when my computer crashed and will not restart afterwards. Garage Band was crashing 2 out of every 3 attempts at recording, and I would have to use Force Quit to escape and start over. Then, while I was in the middle of a very complex project involving Garage Band, iTunes, Finale (music notation program), and Microsoft Word, the computer froze up and I hit restart, thinking that would solve the problem. Big mistake - the computer has not been able to restart since then. I have a late 2005 G5 power mac with 1 GB of memory, 230 GB hard drive (or something like that) and no additional gizmos installed, running OS X 10.4.4. I had upgraded to iLife '08 a month or so ago and have had problems since with unusual crashes and freezes, especially involving Garage Band '08.
When I boot, I get to the gray opening screen with the gray apple logo and the spinning gear (is it really called an "intergalactic frisbee?"), and no further. The fans come on (and begin to ramp up to a huge noise after two minutes or so), the white LED light comes on steadily. I've disconnected all peripherals except my keyboard and mouse (Kensington USB keyboard and Logitech Mouse, both of which seem to work OK still). I can use the keyboard to open the CD/DVD player, and I can start the computer with both the Apple Installer disk and with Disk Warrior 4.0. I've repaired everything I can find with both programs, verified everything available, used Disk Warrior to examine corrupted files, and removed all the .plist files that it said were broken and could not be fixed. The only thing I can't find is that it says I am missing a "tmp" folder in my HD/private/ folder, which I can't seem to locate on the directory on Disk Warrior. Both programs say that all my hardware is fine, and that everything else is OK too. Puzzling. I removed the battery and tested it (it was OK), replaced it, and reset the PMU button on the motherboard even though I know all you have to do is unplug the back for a few minutes or so.............
Everything was fine until this morning when i came into work, started up my Macbook as usual from sleep mode. was able to use OS X for a little while, had to leave to go onsite so i locked my screen (i use sizzle keys and made Command + L to lock my screen to the log on prompt). as soon as the cube spins to the logon screen, BOOM, all i see is the solid light blue screen just sit there. i walk away and 5 minutes later, it's still on there, can't recover or go back to my desktop, so i force shut down (hit the power button, and attempt to reboot the OS X. then thats when it all gets bad. Everytime i boot into OS X it just sits there with the blue screen and flickers back and forth with the gray gear wheel spinning and so forth.
Ok, so next check, i go to boot into my Boot Camp partition into Vista. no problems, was able to boot in my boot camp partition without any problems (im typing this in boot camp at this moment.)
So far i've been able to boot into my Boot Camp and the OS X Restore Disc without any problems.
I booted into the OS X boot disc, and ran Disk Utility, ran the perrmissions check and the disk check and both fixed problems aparently on my OS X partition. went to boot back into OS X, blue screen.
So now i do the PRAM and NVRAM reset doing Command+Option+P+R and again booted into OS X. blue screen.
Booted into Safe Mode (Safe Boot) took awhile, but again. stuck at blue screen and if i press any keys or move the mouse, the grey gear spins for like 10 seconds and just goes back to the blue screen. and the process goes over and over again.
(later on this afternoon) I even ran FSCK to check the volume for problems. "it appears to be OK"
The good thing atleast in this situation is that i can access my OS X partition in Vista (via MacDrive) without any problems, so if having to reload my previous Time Machine backup (which stupid me forgot to back up my system over 60 days ago ) or having to just Archive my OS X and reinstall it, that will have to be my final choice. But i don't REALLY want to have to do this all over again if at all possiable.
My MacBook pro freezes at start up at the gray screen with spinning gear. I did a firmware update yesterday and this happened upon restart. MacBook pro purchased new early 2011 lion
I Have a MacBook pro 17" 2009 with OS 10.7 Lion, I was doing the updates in the middle of the updates give a error and say you need to restart, Now, when I restarted it is showing gray screen with apple logo and spinning gear and is not moving beyond that (even after 3 hours).I tried Resetting my mac PRAM and NVRAM, nothing, I tried Safe Mode, I tried verbose mode(command V) and is show me this,The system bootstrapper has crached: Trace/BPT trap: 5. I don't have originals cd I lose them when I move.and Lion I'm download from app store I don't Have DVDÂ I don't care about information on my mac, I backup everything daily. I just want to make it work again.
i have an ibook g4, and was using it just fine the other night, then when i came back to it a few minutes later it had shut off completely. now when i boot up, the computer freezes at the spinning gear startup screen or at the blank blue screen immediately after the spinning gear. it will boot in single user mode, but it won't boot up with my os x install disc. does anyone know any unix i could try to use to get my mac up and running again, or has anyone had this same problem and knows a fix for it?
When I was working on my MBP last night I noticed the computer slowing down, then a sheer black wash went over the screen and a prompt saying I need to manually power off and then power on the computer with several different languages below. When I did that the computer made the on sound, opened up to the apple logo in the center and the spinning gear below. But its stuck there! I can definitely hear the laptop running but it hasnt budged for the last 12 hours.Â
Info: MacBook Pro (15-inch Mid 2010), Mac OS X (10.0.x)
before I went to bed, I was playing the Sims 2, when my iBook G4 crashed. Our power cord can be a bit dodgy, so sometimes that happens. I didn't really think about it much, just closed the laptop and went to sleep.Last Monday morning, I opened it and pressed the power button. It began turning on, and got as far as the grey screen with the apple and the spinning circle. And then it just froze. The circle stopped turning.
I freaked out a bit, and restarted it a bunch of times, each time with the same result. (One time it stopped spinning, and then told me a restart was required. Huh. The rest of the times the exact same thing happened though.) I even tried unplugging and removing the battery, but it made no difference. So eventually I just shut it and decided to try again later.Last Tuesday I opened it and pressed the power button without much hope, and again the apple and circle came up just fine, then stopped, but then a bunch of words and numbers popped up.I'm a complete computer noob, but they don't look good to me... or are they good?
Kernel version: Darwin Kernel Version 7.9.0: Wed Mar 30 20:11:17 PST 2005; root:xnu/xnu-517.12.7.obj~1/REEASE_PPC
my problem: IBook G4 that recently on reboot is just sitting on the grey screen with the spinning icon as seen here:
what i have done: basically followed apple's tips here
1- booted into safe mode; no change 2- booted into safe mode with shift-command-v to watch the boot; and it just loops around and around; no change 3- reset the nvram/pram; no change 4- booted into single-user mode; ran "fsck -fy" and returned with no errors and "...OK" and rebooted; no change 5- would move on to using my boot disc, however, here is the difficulty- my cd player gave out a bit ago and never replaced it.
so any suggestions? put in a new cd drive? would it recognize it? bring it into the store? i have searched around and haven't seen what to do in my kind of case.
So all of the sudden my mbp will not boot past the spinning wheel/apple screen. I have not let it try for longer than 15 minutes but I don't see the point. I tried to boot in safe mode(hold down shift) but the bar only went to about 1/3 and stopped/disappeared...so I don't know what to do. This shouldn't be happening after a couple months of light use.
Just for extra info:
I am able to boot into windows 7 via boot camp. Cannot boot from cd or go into safe mode.
A few months ago my 2004 iMac froze as I was simply shutting down the power and attempting to restart. I was not installing any new O/S.Today I attempted two things while booting with the O/S recovery disc-1: (a) I slid the disc in and held down the "C" key while I attempted to power it on. Nothing happened and I continued to see the grey screen and spinning wheel.Â
(b) I slid the disc inside and held down the "ALT" key while I attempted to power it on. Three icons showed up: (a) Hard Disk; (b) Recovery Disc; and (c) Test. I clicked on the Test icon and it took me to a new screen with two options: ( i ) Quick Test and ( ii ) Extended Test. I clicked on Quick Test. The first aspect of the Quick Test (I think it was Airport) went through fine and passed. The second aspect of the Quick Test (Logic Board testing) continued to show "In Progress" for a really long time (about 15 mins.). From that I figured something must have gone wrong with the Logic Board.
I have a IMac that suddenly can't move past the grey screen, apple logos, and spinning wheel. I have used the OS system disk to repair the Macintosh HD, the app stated that the repair of the volume was successful, but in trying to use the HD to restart, I am still stuck with the spinning wheel. What should I do next, or what am I doing wrong?Â
Greetings and saluations everyone. I've recently delved into the OSX world via secondhand eMac. The specs are eMac (2006 - not a typo... this is what it says)/1.42gHz/80GB HDD/1GB ram/etc. It came equipped with 10.4.6, did an update to the software and it brought the machine to 10.4.11.
After a week or so of tinkering, I think I have accidentally deleted some very necessary system files. Given that the computer did not come with any manuals or recovery discs, I've been doing some major digging over the last three days via internet and can not come up with a fix for my new love. I saw this post on MacRumors and it nearly is exactly what I'm experiencing: Mac chimes upon pressing of start button, goes to greyish screen with grey Apple logo and a spinning progress indicator then the computer goes silent (no HDD/CD activity)... yet keeps the active grey screen.
I've tried booting into safe mode but to no avail which leads me to think I've accidentally deleted some extremely necessary boot files. However, I do not remember emptying the trash during the last successful boot... is there a way from a command line prompt to "put the files back" to where they go?
I've downloaded several Mac OSX Leopard torrents but can't get them to boot off of USB drive, DVD RW external drive, external USB hard drive nor via OSX 9 CD ... Indeed, I am trying to burn from windows but have learned of several utilities which create ISOs in Mac Format and will decompress DMG files (ISOBuster & TransMac).
Please... will someone give me some good news? For example, telling me there is a way to boot from USB drive (and in what format the mac needs to boot - ISO? DMG? Expanded file system in appropriate directory folders? I don't care about wiping the hard drive... that's absolutely fine... I just need a working system again.
I have an iBook G4 (Late 2004) that I just recently upgraded to Leopard using the 10.5.6 DVD included in the Mac Box Set. Whenever it boots, after the chime the screen stays black until the login screen. This happened occasionally with Tiger, but I found a post somewhere where someone suggested to hold the power button while powering on until you hear a beep. That solved it in Tiger, but I have not once seen a grey Apple screen in Leopard.
I forgot to mention that I have reset the PRAM and PMU.
I changed the permissions from read only to read and write on my start up HD and chose the change everything inside option to read and write. After I did this, my secondary HD no longer allowed me to use it saying I did not have permission. When I tried to change it all selections were in custom mode and would not accept my changes. Same with my main HD.
I rebooted and the grey screen shows up with icon and no spinning wheel. I tried safe mode...same thing. I even tried booting off my back up firewire drive and got a null sign on the grey screen instead of an apple icon. Booted up from the G5 disk and tried to run utilities permissions repair and it would not do it, gave me an error, "No valid packages". Ran disk repair and it said nothing needs repairing. I then booted up using Disk Warrior and rebuilt the HD's directory successfully, but still the G5 will not boot past the icon grey screen, no spinning wheel. I'm spinning though...HELP, I'm dying here. FYI this is a G5 dual core Cypher running Leopard with 3.5 gigs of ram. The start up HD is 250 gig and the secondary is 500 gig
I have an intel imac - can't tell you much about the details as I can't get any info out of it. I installed snow leopard about a year ago - no issue since then other than occassionally the screen goes black but nothing major.Yesterday, I backed up to my usual passport backup and then today, it froze. I couldn't turn it off or restart at all so resorted to the power button. Since then, I can turn it on, it goes to the grey screen (no blue screen) and I get the apple logo and the spinning clock/wheel. For hours and hours....So, I tried one of the apple support pages and worked through - peripherals, safe boot, NVRAM, PRAM, tried to reboot with mac osx disc (the original not snow leopard) - nothing. Absolutely nothing changes - same old grey screen, apple logo and spinning clock/wheel.
I have a 2008 MacBook which after starting displays a white screen grey apple and spinning wheel Have reset pram Have tried starting holding option when the hard drive appears on screen I click on it and then the up arrow below it this takes me back to the spinning wheel with apple screen I don't have the original CDs that came with the machine
I closed all programs and restarted my imac..that is 15 minutes ago...the little gear is still spinning 15 minutes later and hasn't restarted...should I just power off?