MacBook :: Stuck At Grey Apple Screen / Login Window At Startup?
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.
I have a Mac Pro that is stuck at the grey startup screen. Grey apple, spinning wheel. I let it spin for about half an hour and then went on to try other things. Every attempt still leaves me stuck at the spinning grey wheel.
Macbook Pro was purchased in mid-late 2009 and is running on OS X 10.6. Today is suddenly stopped responding and so I turned it off. When I turned it back on it opend to the grey screen with the Apple logo and the loading icon and that is where it stayed. I have been searching for the answer on different forums but have yet to find a solution. My hard drive is appearing in the Disk Utility but not in the box when I try to reinstall OS X.
I have an old G4, think its a powerMac, not sure. It was given to me. When i try to boot up, its loading up, but its stuck at "login window starting" screen.
I installed Mavericks and it restarted and now it is stuck on the apple screen. I've tried to reinstall and it gets to the same point. I should've have back up my Hd but did not do this. Is there any way to access my drive and save the files?
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
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.
I am having trouble with my macbook: It wont load past the Grey apple start up screen with the spining gears, iv done Zapp on the PRAM, iv run ""/sbin/fsck -fy"". And I am now starting in Verbose mode, but its taking AGES, it must be loading for an hour now, its showing "Neb-computer /System/library/coreservices/loginwindow.app/contenst/MacOS/loginwindow: Login window Application started (Over and over and over again). I don't have an install disk.
This machine has been running fine. I installed ilife8 - had eyeTV running. It was slow, hanging, unhappy so I rebooted. It took a long time but eventually restarted - got the chime and after a few seconds the white screen/grey apple. No spinning wheel - no nothing. After a few minutes the CPU fans slowly go to full scream. Have to hold power switch to shut down. Won't go into single user mode, won't boot CD (can't even get the CD out of the machine, but the dvd never spins up). I've pulled all the memory except the original apple mem. I've tried my Kinston mem. There is nothing else in the machine that isn't pure apple.
Information: G5 dual 2.5 up to date Tiger Mac OS X (10.4.11)
When I turn on lap top (iBook G4 Mac OS x 10.3) i get the following message "Login Window Starting" I followed Apple support guidance - specifically safe start and performing the fsck then reboot process and neither works for me. I don't have the disks any more so I cant use them for reloading the software. I want to sell the laptop so i just want to format the HD. Is it possible to format from command lines?
Macbook Pro 13" (2011) Upon startup, displays a grey screen, then after a few seconds, the logon screen, I would logon, then it would show the Apple White boot screen, then it would ask me to log on again (sometimes)
Upon initial restart after installation, the grey screen with the Apple icon comes up and gets stuck there. I have tried to power down and get to disk utility to try repairing permisions but it always goes to the log on screen not the recovery mode. All user ID's get a pop up that says 'you are unableto log in to the user account'x' at this time. Logging in to the account failed because an error occurred. The spinning wheel spinns by the PW the whole time the error box is up but goes away when you click OK. It also knows if you put in an incorrect PW or not Have mac mini server 10.7 and an airport extreme the net was really slow at first on other nodes so I had to move to the guest net I cannot logon to the aitport cause it is single sinon enabled Worked yesterday not today after sleeping I can log onto my Wiki page with users though?
New iMac is stuck on grey apple screen after startup. It is a 3.4GHz Quad-core Intel Core i5 running OS 10.9.4. The problem occurred after a migration from my older 2009 iMac which is running Snow Leopard 10.6.6. When the restart occurred from Migration Assistant, the new computer will not boot up to the login screen. Disk utility did not solve problem.
Info: iMac (27-inch, Late 2013), OS X Mavericks (10.9.4)
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).
I have a Macbook Pro 13 from the summer of 2009. After Christmas I decided to upgrade my hard drive and memory. This is what I got. [URL] For about a week everything seemed to work perfectly. I then began to have problems almost every day (finder crashing, etc). I reinstalled OSX probably 5 times using my previous account until finally did a clean wipe and reinstalled OSX again. It now seems to be working for the most part, but booting takes about two minutes. It gets stuck on the grey screen with the Apple logo with the turning gear for a couple of minutes before it boots. Normally it wouldn't bother me too much, but after the problems I was having before, I really wanted to make sure that there was no problem with my new hard drive or memory. After doing the usual suggestions for slow boot time (resetting PRAM, disconnecting external devices, repairing disk permissions, etc.) nothing changed. I booted into verbose mode and it seems to hang up for awhile before listing
disk0s2 i/o error
It does this twice before booting, hanging up for about a minute before giving the error. I am not sure if i should return it under warranty because I am not sure its broken. Like I said, it seems perfectly fine right now with the exception of the boot time. Using the Apple Hardware Check, even the extended check, didn't give any errors. The SMART status for the hard drive is verified. Is this clearly a hard drive issue, or could it be something else? Has anyone else had a similar problem?
Last two days, I notice that my MBP gets stuck at the white Apple startup screen until I reboot. I've also notice getting the beachball, even when using Firefox.
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.
...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.
I have a much loved ibook G4 14" (late 2004??). It has just died. Well, in so much as it won't boot up. The ibook either gets as far as the apple grey screen and hangs, gets to the login screen and hangs, actually loads up finder etc and hangs or none of the above. Sometimes flashing red, blue green black.
After lots of research online over the past few days I tried the following: I have tried safe mode (not working), starting the command prompt screen (single user and verbose modes), started open firmware, and tried booting from a CD. Nothing works as the boot gets so far then hangs. I have flashed the PRam, resetted the NVRam, and have stopped short of opening up the case to dismantle it!
I just really want to access the hard drive now. I have tried Target disk mode and linked the ibook (pressing T) via firewire to a PowerPC G5, but the G5 doesn't recognise the ibook. System profiler on the G5 shows the target mode connected and working fine via firewire, just the icon for the ibook/target doesnt mount on the G5 desktop so I cant access it.Currently the boot freezes within a couple of minutes.I tried the hardware test CD that came with the ibook years ago, I have also tried booting from an OSX Panther CD. I'm assuming they would be bootable.
I forgot to mention that in linking with the G5 in target mode, a disk that I put in the ibook drive appeared on the G5 desktop as an external drive, therefore I wonder why i cannot see the actual ibook drive mounted. The CD drive works as it mounted on the G5.Does the ibook have an actual PRam battery that can be replaced? Maybe this is an issue?Am I able to actually remove the hard-drive and access it as an external drive somehow?
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.
I am trying to reformat my Macbook pro. I run the reinstall disc. When I type in my user name and password then click restart, the system reboots but get stuck on a grey screen. You hear the cd spinning for a minute or so but then it goes off. Do I have a bad disk(doesn't appear to be scratched anywhere) or am I not being patience enough.
So yesterday i turned my laptop on to find out it wasnt booting up past the grey screen. Later on i did some trouble shooting and finally got it past to the main desktop screen. Now, recently i had just uninstalled and deleted my Windows 7 Pro partition i had put onto my laptop a while back but when doing so, when i tried getting my hard drive back to full storage amount by deleting the partition,it gave me some error. I believe i figured out the error and was able to use my laptop from then. Once my computer was letting me get to the desktop screen, once i would click on an app it would often give me the pin wheel and stop me from clicking on anything else for a good minute.
Today,i had backed everything up and thought that i would just reformat and re install OSX to remedy the whole issue. This was not acheived. I had been able to get to the desktop screen a few times but still got the pin wheel situation going on. A couple tries later im stuck here at my grey boot screen. No Apple sign showing up, just stuck. Im usually a very computer savey person but this is kind of just making me wonder. I ordered a new hard drive (which i was going to upgrade anyways)but wanted to know if this even could possibly be the issue. I upgraded from my stock hard drive about 6 months after i had gotten my laptop (mid 2009 model). The last 3 years ive been traveling very often, flying frequently and using it often for playing my DJ gigs. Im wondering if alltitude and hot clubs could take a tole on a hard drive when its running hot?
Info: MacBook Pro, Mac OS X (10.6.8), 2.2 C2D,8GB RAM,320GB WD 7200RPM HD
having problems with my MacBook Pro. Turns on, straight into user log in. Once password is entered it tries to start up then eventually after grey progress bar has finished brings up a grey screen, then shuts down again.
I've tried starting in safe mode and resetting PRAM etc with no success.
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.
After partitioning my hard drive, I was not able to boot up my computer. Currently it is stuck at the white screen when it boots up. I tried using the USB Recovery Disk to boot up however it does not seem like it is responding to anything
I pressed C while having the USB inserted I also tried pressing D to go in to the Apple Hardware Test nothing happened.
I also tried resetting the VRAM? It did beep and it reset however I still can't bootup
I installed all the Software Updates available, including the iSight and Airport updates (mainly to get rid of them, and I may add these later to my G5 iMac), and now when I reboot, I get no further than the "Starting Windows Login" part...
I have to assume its something to do with adding the updates as it was all working fine before then...
I can start in Safe Mode fine, and I get in OK, but normal boot halts (no errors, mouse works, just goes not go any further) at the "Starting Login Window"
Any thoughts on how to either A) Reverse the Updates B) Get around this?
