MacBook Pro :: Unable To Boot System / Grey Screen Of Death At Startup
Oct 1, 2010
The other day my 1st gen MBP functioned without any probs, until it suddenly powered down. After I removed the question marks from my eyes, I offcourse tried to reboot it.
But it never makes it beyond the grey screen, sometimes untill the apple logo, sometimes not even that far.
Offcours I googled around first to gather some info before I decided to put this problem down on this board. I found this could be a HDD failure, but in those cases, with other people, it could be powered holding apple + s, and doing some checks that way.
Mine doesn't even come that far
I have a second hand 1st gen MBP with upgraded HDD and RAM, snow leopard, and coincidently since last week no more battery... so i may have powered down a completely unprepared mac by tripping over the wire, once or twice...
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Jan 12, 2011
I own an iBook G4. I could not get it to boot up, it would just go to a grey screen with the apple symbol and a timer/clock that looked like a gear.FYI: I may provide more information than necessary in the text below. I'm not sure what is and isn't relevant.
Following some advice I found in this forum I got out my old OS disks to boot from the disc instead of the hard drive. I intended to archive the old hard drive and install my latest OS (10.4.6 on the disc, 10.4.11 was the version I had been running on the machine, I believe). The machine told me it needed 4.5 Gb to install 10.4.6 Tiger, but I only had 4.0 Gb left on the hard drive. So instead, I archived and installed with the OS that came with the computer originally, 10.3.4.
I got things going, did the archive and install, and got to the log in screen. Unfortunately, I could not remember the password, so I booted up in single user mode, and entered the following to get into the machine:
1. mount -uw /
2. rm /var/db/.AppleSetupDone
3. shutdown -h now
This got me in with a new admin login, and I started up in 10.3.4. I soon noticed that I could still see all of the files that I put on the hard drive on my old operating system. I thought I shouldn't be able to see them, but since I could I decided to try to copy them to an external hard drive. When I did, I got an error message saying that there was a read/write error. I was not entirely surprised, but I decided it was time to turn back to the forums for help.
What I want to do is copy everything from my old hard drive onto an external hard drive, make room on the iBook hard drive to reinstall my latest operating system (10.4.6). Once I've done that I'd like to get the essential files back onto the iBook from the external hard drive and continue using my computer (even though it is a dinosaur).
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May 30, 2010
About two weeks ago I'm using my snow leopard partition of my macbook pro and browsing the internet via firefox. My mouse freezes for a second, and then my computer just shuts down. I power back up my macbook pro to find a 'cancel or prohibitory symbol'. Strange thing is I can hold down option and boot into my windows partition no problem I go through all the motions suggested by the apple website, such as resetting the PRAM etc.. Nothing works. Flash forward to today. I finally get a hold of my snow leopard installation disc and boot my macbook with it. I run the disk utility and it finds that my hard drive's good to go.
I read online and it seems that the best option would be to install snow leopard again. I decide install it again, but about halfway through the installation, the installation fails and pretty much freezes. I had to shut down the macbook via the power button. Now, whenever I try to boot up my macbook I hear the chime, but nothing happens after that. I am just left with a grey screen. I cannot enter safe mode, single user mode, and when I try to choose the start up disk by holding down option, the arrow pops up to choose which disk to pick, but there are no disks to choose from.
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Dec 1, 2010
just posting for some basic advice, or technical help.... I keep getting a grey screen of death its happened 3 times in the past 2 weeks, the computer resets ok and then works fine for a while .... but i don't know whats going on ... or how to check for any problems ? ? I never had this problem before, I have discovered a small dent in my rear cover near the CD drive slot, I dont know when this has occured, maybe recently ... but its minor... almost invisible ... the laptop hasn't been dropped or anything like that and I assume its happened whilst in my bag so no serious shock .... ..I don't know if this has any bearing on anything �I got a report and have posted it below : it says its processor ? ?Tbh Ive found this laptop to be very slow on certain things since I have had it, esp when launching finder �. or the dashboard, it take forever to fill in the information and finder takes ages to fill in the mb in each folder or to load the app icons and often crashes , which Iwouldnt expect with a I7 ... but this has been like it since the start so assumed it a osx bug ..., can anyone suggest anything ? ? or what i should do, i dont want this happening in the middle of working on a video project etc .
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Oct 11, 2010
I am currently stuck on the grey screen of death with the flashing ? file folder.I have tried resetting the pram etc. and when i boot from my snow leopard disk the disk utility does not recognize my HD. Is there anything else I can do to fix this? Or try?
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Jun 24, 2009
I booted the machine like it said, and heard some beeps - didn't think much of it, but then it just went to the grey screen with Apple logo and the loader, and hangs there.ow what I can do to solve this, is there a key combination that can reset something or an restore EFI file
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Jan 8, 2010
This has been going on for a while. It happened first a month or so ago.
I turn on my 2008 iMac 24". The screen turns white like always, but no Apple icon appears. It starts to make a loud nice again and again. Bip, Bip. Pause. Bip, Bip, Pause. Bip, Bip. Pause.
I turn it off. Turn it on again. Same thing happens. Repeat.
I take out the cable powering the computer and go to school. I put it back in when i returned and turned the computer on. It worked fine.
Nothing happened again until a week after. I was sitting working on the computer, when it out of nowhere shows the "grey screen of death". I turn off the computer, take out the cable, leave it out for half and hour or so, then turn the computer on. It works fine. Works for a week. Same thing happens again.
Now it starting to appear more often tht though, and I'm afraid to turn it on until i get an external HD so i can Time Machine, in case it will appear more often for every time i turn it on.
The guarantee is not valid anymore (never purchased AppleCare) and i can't bring it to a store and show them what it does, because it doesn't always happen.
I read that it might a kernel panic somethingsomething, and that i need to wipe the HD. Though that was when the computer had the grey screen all the time. Not just occasionally like on mine.
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Jun 28, 2012
I've had my iMac, 27" 3.4 Ghz i7 16GB, since Jan 2012. From my excitement of having 2TB, I put all my info from every hard-drive ever owned on it, deleting the originals with the faith that I can trust it till I purchase a 2TB external for the backup.
Two months later it crashed showing the 'grey screen of death' and got stuck with every restart on the welcome-screen (grey apple logo with the circuling loading graphic underneath) only with a new loading bar in below them. The service center claimed the HD crashed, and replaced it (and it took me more than a month going around finding a place that would recover the data before they could replace the HD)
I finally receive it after a long period of living on this earth without a computer (which is problematic for a freelancing graphic designer) and 4 days later crashes again the same exact way, this time the service center claimed it was a software problem but got it fixed.
I've received it yesterday again and I only downloaded trusted software (VLC, DIVx...) and did not dare transfer any old data and stuck to only surfing the net catch up to what life I've been missing out on. It is still crashing but restarting fixing it.
The only thing common with all 11 'crashings' is safari was open, and I really doubt and do hope that it's not the problem.
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Jul 24, 2010
Hi all, I have two Powerbook G4 laptops. Both have very similar problems. When I try to start up, the grey screen with the apple and spinning wheel appears, but I can't get beyond that. If I walk away for an hour, when I come back there will still be a grey screen with apple and spinning wheel.
I admit I know little about this sort of thing, so I began poking around online for solutions. I tried Tech Tool Deluxe. Inserted the disk and held down "C," but again it never progressed beyond the grey screen with apple and spinning wheel. Most frustrating. Is there any other way of running the disk with the laptop?
Entering the terminal yielded slightly different results on each machine.
Powerbook #1: Once in terminal I typed...
/sbin/fsck -fy
...response was...
disk0s10: I/O error.
Invalid Key Length
(4, 44890)
** Volume check failed
...tried /sbin/fsck -fy over and over, always received the same results.
Powerbook #2: Once in terminal, this appears...
jnl: update_fs_block: failed to update block 1073777488 (ret 5)
jnl: journal_open: Error replaying the journal!
hfs: early jnl init: failed to open/create the journal (retval 0)
...and it won't even let me type /sbin/fsck -fy.
I tried plugging both latops into my desktop in target mode. In both cases the target icon appeared on the laptop screen but the hard drive icon never appeared on the desktop screen. I would love to at least retrieve a few files off each machine, if nothing else.
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Nov 9, 2010
just using my new MBP today and twice when turning it on it started to boot up and got as far as the blue screen (just before the desktop pic and stayed there.Is this normal sometimes?
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Feb 15, 2012
So I encountered the grey screen with the spinning wheel 2 days ago. I am using a MacBook Pro (Late 2011), I bought it only 2 months ago. I have tried to reset PRAM, booting the computer with; shift, command v, option, command r, command s, and re-installing Lion from Disk Utility. My last and only way out of this seems to be a reformating of the Hard Drive
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Apr 19, 2012
my macbook pro won't start up...it begins to boot up but stops short before the screen comes on. the light which indicates that the computer is on dims and the booting.stops.
Info:
MacBook Pro
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Dec 31, 2009
I just picked up a Mini display port to DVI adapter for my Macbook Pro so that I could hook it up to my 32 inch 1080p tv that I use as my main desktop monitor. It works just great in OSX (though for some odd reason I have to put the laptop to sleep then plug it in for it to work correctly. Can't be on or off otherwise I don't get the full picture not sure why) but in bootcamp it instantly causes a blue screen. If I plug it in then reboot to windows I get a blue screen even before its loaded windows all the way. I assume this is a driver issue but I'm using the latest boot camp drivers.
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Nov 8, 2008
My friend updated her 13" Black MacBook yesterday, specifically the "Digital Camera Raw Compatibility Update 2.3". After a reboot, she got the Apple "Blue Screen of Death", with no login window showing. Looking at system.log, there's a section that looks to be the culprit (this began after restarting due to the install of the update):
Nov 7 13:55:29 Philbert /System/Library/CoreServices/loginwindow.app/Contents/MacOS/loginwindow[31]: Login Window Application Started
Nov 7 13:55:30 Philbert /usr/sbin/ocspd[53]: starting
Nov 7 13:55:35 Philbert kernel[0]: display: Not usable
Nov 7 13:55:35 Philbert com.apple.launchd[1] (com.apple.WindowServer[50]): Exited abnormally: Hangup
Nov 7 13:55:35 Philbert com.apple.launchd[1] (com.apple.WindowServer): Throttling respawn: Will start in 6 seconds
Nov 7 13:55:42 Philbert com.apple.launchd[1] (com.apple.WindowServer[64]): Exited abnormally: Hangup
Nov 7 13:55:42 Philbert com.apple.launchd[1] (com.apple.WindowServer): Throttling respawn: Will start in 10 seconds
Nov 7 13:55:52 Philbert com.apple.launchd[1] (com.apple.WindowServer[67]): Exited abnormally: Hangup
Nov 7 13:55:52 Philbert com.apple.launchd[1] (com.apple.WindowServer): Throttling respawn: Will start in 10 seconds
Nov 7 13:56:02 Philbert com.apple.launchd[1] (com.apple.WindowServer[70]): Exited abnormally: Hangup
Here are some things I've observed/tried, many from sources via the Internet:
- I'm able to login in single-user mode
- I'm not able to login in Safe Mode (hangs on white screen with Apple logo)
- I've tried booting off the 10.5 install DVD and running Disk Utility - verify/repair disk, this comes back ok. However, if I try to verify/repair permissions, it runs for about 10 - 20 mins then freezes. I let the frozen process run overnight (10-12 hours) and no feedback. I can move the mouse, but I cannot select anything.
- When the laptop is booted and on the blue screen, I can connect to it via AFP
- I've tried manually changing the permissions of "/", by doing - chmod 775 /; chmod 1775 /;
- I've tried removing the com.apple.WindowServer.plist and com.apple.loginscreen.plist files in case they were corrupted by the update
- I tried running the "installer" command to re-install the update package from the command line. I run it with the "verbose" flags, I get no output and the process hangs.
Since I can connect via AFP I figure I'll be backing the data up and re-installing OS X. Pretty lame though, considering this failure was caused by running a Software Update. Anyone have a last minute suggestion for me before I go down that path?I've attached the full system.log.
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Feb 12, 2009
I posted this in the emac forum, but since it concerns the OS....thought I'd also post here. have an older emac 700 that used to work, but now when I try to boot ...after the apple screen with spinning wheel I get the gray screen of death. I have tried lots of things, including reinstalling OS from a retail purchased 10.4 dvd. THe OS install *looks* like it is working until it goes to reboot at the end, & then hangs again. I have also tried booting off a firewire drive, again, hangs. I know that there are boot cmd-v or -s options that give readouts of what's happening, but I don't know how to pause the process & whatever messages of relevance may be present near the end disappear quickly when the screen turns gray. In the process I have also zapped the pram/nvram.....& have reset the pmu button. I'm at the end of my rope, as I'm all out of things to try. As for what I was doing when the whole thing went south on me.. I was playing with a newer Belkin usb wireless adapter & trying to find the right driver. I downloaded the Zydas zd1211 driver set, but inadvertently unpacked the 10.3 version instead of the 10.4 (which is what this emac has). It went into auto reboot & that was that.....gray screen of death. Coincidental? I dunno. I just include the detail.
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May 30, 2012
I sure hope your day is faring better than mine...To try and make my new issue easier to follow and to save face as I feel like an idiot, permit me to explain in bullet format:
First things first: I was running 10.6.8 SL on my 2006/7 model MacBook pro 15.4 w 2 gig sdram, right now I'm running nothing. When I turn on Mac it goes to grey screen and I see a folder/?/apple symbols rapidly interchanging on screen. This occurred after trying to use TM for my first time as I deleted some items I shouldn't have. In time machine all seemed kosher until the first attempt said not enough space on hd so I decided to only click on sys folder in TM. this was where prefs and files were accidentally deleted from after all. The kicker is my Mac still functioned I just noticed my HD no longer had a name, and a few other issues were happening, but I could access and open files, go online, etc... Post time machine none of that was possible! I tried first putting SL disk in but wouldn't read it, so tried restarting w disk in drive. HUGE ERROR on my part. This is where the grey screen desc above took its place. I looked on iPhone and have followed all available suggestions but have come to realize at some point I must have in error created a firmware Pw. I tried entering it but the lock simply stays put (when I attempted one of many fixes to my problem listed online). So now I'm left not knowing if whatever happened messed w my firmware pw or if I somehow chose something diff as pw but I highly doubt that. In any case, I have all of my life locked into a useless box now and I had thought this is why I bought external and used time machine. I've come to loathe TM. it's not as simple as I had thought otherwise none of this dshould have occurred. Does anyone have any ideas as to how I reset or altogether delete firmware pw, and best way to reinstall.
Info:MacBookPro, Mac OS X (10.6.8), 2.16 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo 2 GB 667 MHz DDR2 SDRAM
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Aug 11, 2008
I'd been noticing recently that my mini would periodically give me the gray screen of death when I'd boot it up, but after holding down the power to shut it down and restarting everything would be fine. I didn't think too much of it. I just moved out of my old place and into my new place and now my mini is doing it much more frequently. I just hooked it up for the first time since moving and I had to do the shut down/start up process three times before I got into OSX.
Then I shut down OSX just to try it again... same exact results. It took three restarts to be able to boot up again. Does anybody know what might cause something like this? The only thing I can think of is that maybe something is up with the RAM. I did upgrade the RAM to 2x2 gig of OWC memory a few months back, but never saw anything like this happening. When the computer is running I haven't noticed any strange issues.
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Feb 22, 2009
Today, when I have been playing Warcraft III, randomly everything will freeze and I will get a blue screen of death error for a fraction of a second, then my laptop will restart.
I am currently playing on a Macbook Pro with bootcamp for windows XP with service pack 2.
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Mar 15, 2012
My Snow leopard machine hangs during startup at the screen with the Grey Apple logo. It appears there is a SW issue with my OS X boot partition. Here are facts I have learned:The computer boots fine if I hold option at startup and select my boot camp partitionThe compute boots fine if I attach an external HD with OS X 10.6Running a disk repair from the external HD, I see the following two issues that are repaired. Also, note the last line about boot partitionsAfter this disk repair, the disk will still not boot, it hangs at the Grey Apple logo.Booting in safe mode does not resolve the issue, the machine will still not boot to a desktopBooting in Verbose mode, drivers initialize with the last succesful line being the ethernet drives (I believe) and then the hangup occurs. It is unclear what state the boot process is at on the hangup.
This situation has happen twice in the past few weeks. The first time I did a reinstall of OS X to resolve the issue. Then, the issue appeared again approximately two weeks later. I'm hoping to avoid a second reinstall (And really, avoid this issue in the future). It seems perhaps something in the boot partition table or the OS partition, although disk utility says the partition is fine. I have downloaded Test Disk 6.13 to look at the partition table, but I don't know how to interpret the outputs of that program.
Info:
MacBook Pro (15-inch Core 2 Duo), Mac OS X (10.6.3), 2 GB RAM, Boot Camp, Ex HD avail
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Jan 5, 2011
I've been reading this site for a while now, first time I'm posting. I recently purchased 8 GB of RAM for my 2010 13" MBP. There are two 4 GB DDR3 PC3-10500 1333mhz sticks. When I install them in the laptop my computer does not get past the apple logo boot screen (the spinning disc freezes). However, I can boot into Windows (boot camp) without issues.
Also, when I pair either of the 4 GB sticks with one of my old 2 GB stock sticks the laptop boots up fine in OS X. The system profiler registers it as 6 GB of 1067 mhz RAM (the stock sticks are 1067 mhz)
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Feb 19, 2009
Today I came home from work and turned on my Mac Pro. At first everything appeared normal and I walked away on a call for a few minutes. Out of the corner of my eye I noticed the screen was flashing to black off and on. I turned off the tower to try and restart it and now it wont boot!
I have removed all other hard drives aside from the boot drive. Re-seated all RAM. Tried various combination's of RAM. Tried to load the snow leopard install only to get a kernal panic. Tried again with just RAM and received a kenal panic as well.
*Update* It seems that the RAM when I swapped it out was VERY hot for only being in a short period of time (under 10 min). Not sure if this helps.
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May 9, 2012
recently a friend of mine offered to update my 2009 MacBook to Mac osx Lion. when I received the computer back from him, it required a rather large update that has put my MacBook in a terrible state.
upon rebooting from the update, it froze at the grey Apple loading screen, and of course I thought nothing of it and gave it a little restart. Since then I cannot get it past the grey screen or the login window. it seems as though I cannot type in my password or click 'sleep' or any option the window gives me. I've been working on this issue all day, and I've tried countless things from the apple support community, with no avail.
I've tried clearing the cache, I've tried safe mode, I've tried the command+option+control+enter trick on the login page, I'm even trying to boot from the install disc my friend gave me...and it's just refusing to move past the grey screen.
Info:
MacBook, Mac OS X (10.7.3)
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Sep 3, 2014
Have tried different things that have been suggested....reboot PRAM holding down option command P R etc but nothing yet has worked. Don't have installation disk as MacBook is 9 years old so must've thrown disk out years ago.
Info:
MacBook, Mac OS X (10.6.4)
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Aug 29, 2009
When my son's computer is turned on it just goes to grey screen.. I've tried a number of troubleshooting things...starting while holding "c" to boot with install disk...starting holding "shift" for safe boot. I did the PRM (?) reset thing holding Apple-option-p-r keys while starting and that did add the start up chime...before it would just go to the grey screen, no chime no spinning wheel...but still no boot.The computer is still under warranty but soonest appointment at Apple Store is 3 days from now!!!
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Jun 26, 2014
I have a MacBook Pro from 2010 I believe with iOS Maverick installed. (MacKeeper is also on there, which I just found out is apparently malware)
So three days ago I was watching Netflix, the image froze, but the audio kept going. Figured my internet was slow, so I waited a little, nothing happened. pressed escape to leave the full screen mode, but nothing happened. None of the keys would do anything, not even the sound or brightness keys. So I did a force shut down by holding down the power button.
I waited a little, then decided to turn it back on. Start up sound played, white screen with grey apple logo and loading gear appeared together with a grey loading bar. I figured that this meant it had to repair something. But after about a minute or two it just went to a black screen/ shut down. I left it off for a day, tried it again, same thing. Next day I tried booting it up while holding the shift key to do the safe boot (I knew it wouldn't work since I already had the grey loading bar anyways), same thing happened.
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Jun 4, 2009
My macbook wont boot up for some reason. When trying to turn it on it goes to a grey screen and nothing pops up, eventually a little picture pops up that has what looks like a folder with a question mark in the middle. I then tried booting from the CD and when trying to do that a picture of the world pops up and then also the folder with the question mark in the middle. I thought i may have been the harddrive so i bought a new one and it still has the same problem.
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Apr 1, 2012
My wife has a Macbook with an Intel Core 2 Duo processor (Macbook4,1). I am trying to replace the original SATA hard disk (160 GB) with an SSD. I have two SSDs here with me:
1) Intel 320 series, 160 GB
2) Crucial M4, 128 GB
In both cases, after replacing the hard disk with the SSD, I am unable to get the Macbook to get any further than the "Mac sound" and grey screen.
In my first attempt, I cloned the original disk to the SSD on another computer, verified the data got on there OK, and installed the SSD into the Macbook. In subsequent attempts, I just formatted the SSD to see if the Mac would recognize it at all.
When the original hard disk is installed, and my Snow Leopard install DVD is in the DVD drive, during the boot, I can hold down the option key and get a boot choice of booting from the hard disk or the DVD. With either SSD installed, when holding down the option key I get no choices at all, it just sits there (it does access the DVD for a few seconds but then nothing).
I have another 160 GB "regular" hard disk here as well and when I install that I also get the choice to boot from the hard disk or the DVD (although booting from the hard disk does not work since it's a hard disk from a PC).
combination of Macbook and SSD, installing into the hard drive bay? I've seen many posts from people who have had success putting an SSD into their Macbook so I am assuiming it's possible.
Some more information about the Macbook:
Boot ROM Version: MB41.00C1.B00
SMC Version: 1.31f1
Info:
MacBook, Mac OS X (10.6.8)
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Apr 19, 2012
Mac book is stuck on the grey screen with the apple logo and the spinning timer?
Info:
MacBook
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May 26, 2012
I was having trouble submitting an assignment on the American Military University website. After I finally submitted and verified my submission was successful, Finder popped open a window, without being prompted, with a specific part of my "private" folder showing. In the info window it showed that I had read only privleges, but that a user named "wheel" had permissions. Thing is, there is no such user. I am the sole user, and that is not my user name. I panicked, thinking I was being hacked, and moved the entire "private" folder to the trash. It was over 5 gigs. I had to input my admin password after dropping the folder in the trash. Then, my system froze. Now I can't get past the grey boot screen with apple logo and spinning wheel.
I've tried zapping PRAM. I ran disk utility from both the install disk and the startup disk for live verify. NO errors found. Still won't boot. I tried safe mode, and got a status bar below the apple logo but it vanished before filling completely and then the MacBook just continued to hang there spinning the wheel without a status bar. Tried rebooting while holding shift-command-v and got to watch as the computer tried to boot in safe mode, but I got the following messages before the darn thing just began to hang there again:
getaddrlinfo(): node name nor username provided, or not known
getaddrlinfo(): node name nor username provided, or not known
getaddrlinfo(): node name nor username provided, or not known
getaddrlinfo(): node name nor username provided, or not known
launch_msg(): Socket is not connected
launch_msg(): Socket is not connected
Info:
MacBook Pro 13.3", Mac OS X (10.6.6)
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May 28, 2012
Today I was using my MacBook 2008 aluminum, and I ran out of battery so the system shut down the computer to save the files. I plugged in my computer to start it up but the screen turned grey for a while. I shut down my computer and turned it on and it started up to the grey login screen but it won't let me boot passed it. I have tried to get passed it in safemode but it did not work. I have tried to repair my hard drive and my permissions and reinstall osx lion but it didnt work.
Info:
MacBook, Mac OS X (10.1.x)
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