Get Your Mac Outta the Gray

Every once in a while during start up a mac will and get stuck at a gray screen with a perpetual loading symbol. If that happens there are a few steps you can take to try and get it back up and running without booting from a disk, restoring your laptop, going to the Apple store, or buying a new computer.

Force Restart - Press and hold power button until computer shuts down.

The first thing to try is a force shutdown. Sometimes the laptop will just hit a hitch while booting up and forcing the laptop to shut down and then restart can give it a fresh start.

Disconnect all peripheral devices

Peripheral devices are anything extra you have attached to the laptop. For example, a mouse, keyboard, flash drive, or other external device. If these devices are not correctly plugged in, they have a disconnected wire, or are not operating properly, those problems can cause the computer to have trouble connecting or recognizing them on startup and get it caught at the startup screen. The easy fix for this is to shutdown the laptop, unplug all the peripheral devices, and then restart the laptop without anything connected.

Safe Boot - Press and hold ‘Shift’ key after start up noise.

If those two fixes do not work, the next thing to try is booting the computer into safe boot/safe mode. When a computer boots in safe mode it checks the directory and fixes any problems that may be there. The computer also only loads select functions and runs other diagnostic problems. If you want to see what is being loaded and checked during a safe boot press Shift+Command+V instead of just shift and you will enter what is known as verbose mode in addition to safe boot, that will give you a report as to what is going on. If a safe boot works sometimes all you have to do from there is reboot normally and your troubles are gone. However, if just running a safeboot did not work, re-enter safe mode and see if maybe your hard drive is full, a program is malfunctioning, there is a driver causing issues, etc...

Reset NVRAM/PRAM  - Press command + option + p + r on startup.

The NVRAM, also know as the PRAM, is a section of memory on your mac that contains user preferences such as volume, screen resolution, and the like. Problems such as a gray screen can arises when data stored in the NVRAM gets corrupted. Corruption can occur when the computer shuts down or freezes in the middle of a system update or you upgrade or replace a piece of computer hardware. Another problem that can play havoc with the NVRAM is if the battery powering it is low or dead. A healthy NVRAM is important because when the system is booting it looks to this memory section in order to know what settings and preferences to boot, if it cannot do that or cannot do it correctly problems occur. To reset the NVRAM/PRAM you will first have to shut the computer down, restart it, and then on startup press and hold Command + Option + p + r.

** This step will reset all of your settings to factory default so you may have to reset your clock, screen resolution, volume settings, and any other user preference you may have changed previously. **

Reset SMC  - Press shift + option + control  and the power button while laptop is off and plugged in to the wall outlet.

The SMC is a part of the motherboard and is in charge of a lot of basic functions that help your computer run. Some of these functions include monitoring output, calibrating and charging the battery, monitoring the power button in order to know if the user wants to shut the laptop down, turn it on, or put it to sleep, control back-lighting and performance lights, and run hard drive spin downs and power up sequences. It is a very important part of the computer’s system and can cause issues if it gets out of whack. Different types of Apple products have different ways of resetting the SMC. When dealing with a laptop the first step is to turn the computer off. After that, you need to connect the laptop to it’s charger which in turn needs to be plugged into a wall outlet. Once that is done, all that remains is to press shift + control + option  and the power button simultaneously.

Single-user mode - Press command + s on startup

The last step is to try is a disk check and repair. In order to do that you are going to enter something called single-user mode (Command + s) which will bring you to the command line. Once there type /sbin/fsck - fy. The computer will then run through five different checks and will report either “This volume appears to be ok” or “File system was modified”. If you got the later message run the /sbin/fsck - fy command until you get  “This volume appears to be ok”. To get the computer back to a normal start up just power off the laptop and restart it as usual.

Happy computing!