Gray Screen of Death

**chaddyc** · February 25th, 2002, 09:42 AM

Ran into a little problem yesterday. I woke up my PowerBook from sleep and the screen turned gray. Rebooted about 5 times with the same result: I would get a happy Mac and the spinning beach ball and then gray. I ran Disk Utility from the 10.1 CD, with no problems found. I ran the hardware test twice, with no problems found. I ran fsck starting up from single user mode, with no problems found. Out of desperation, I started up holding down Shift, and it booted fine. So my question is, what doesn't load when you hold shift and how do I fix it? I am running 10.1.3 only. Thanks.

**Nummi_G4** · February 25th, 2002, 02:26 PM

I doubt this has anything to do with it... but if I have a CD in my CD drive when booting into OS X... it just sits there with that grey start-up screen... Like a crappy wintel machine.

**chaddyc** · February 25th, 2002, 03:10 PM

It will start-up fine with a CD, just not the hard drive. So either the hard drive is faulty, which is unlikely as it's only 2 months old, or some file used during startup is either missing or bad. Any thoughts?

**edX** · February 25th, 2002, 03:40 PM

ok, i will work from the assumption you mean an external hd - unplug it and things go smoothly.

I recently had this problem with a brand new drive. How long it has been in your hands may not correlate with how long ago it was manufactured. You may need a bridge update (which is what fixed it for me). call the manufacturer. the first tech person will probably try to blow off your request as apple's problem or such. if that happens, talk to a supervisor and explain that you think this is the problem. they can get you the updates and instructions for installing them. for me it required some command line stuff that i was iffy about, but it worked.

just out of curiosity - what brand is the drive?

**simX** · February 25th, 2002, 03:44 PM

Have you tried waiting? I've found that sometimes my machine hangs for up to a minute with the gray screen after a crash or a force restart. You might leave it on for a few hours at that screen just to be sure UNIX isn't doing anything in the background to fix your disks (even though you've done fsck).

**chaddyc** · February 25th, 2002, 04:09 PM

It's an IBM 20 GB Travelstar internal drive. I've waited for up to ten minutes on the thing, but if it needs more time, I can try that too. I'll try both suggestions and report back. Thanks for the help.

**chaddyc** · February 26th, 2002, 12:58 PM

It turns out holding shift while starting in 10.1.3 disables login items. In this case, iTunesHelper was causing the problem. Once removed, startup worked fine. Thanks for the suggestions.