IMac shuts down after gray screen/spinning wheel

Every time I start my iMac G5, I hear the chime and then see the gray screen Apple with the spinning wheel, but then it shuts down, never making it to the blue screen and desktop.
Can anyone tell me what the cause of this might be?
Thanks!

Are you able to boot into safe mode? Are you able to boot from your OSX installation disk?

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IMac shuts down after gray screen

I accidently unplugged my iMac while it was on. Now it turns on shows the gray screen with Apple logo then an empty progress bar flashes below the logo a couple of times and then it shuts off.
I've tried resetting my PRAM, unplugging everything from the USB port and disk repair. Nothing seems to work. I would like to be able to recover my files because unfortunately I didn't get around to backing them up.
Any suggestions?
Thanks!

You will need to start your computer with the original system disk that came with your computer and run Disk Utility, then click repair disk. I see in your statement your said your ran Disk Repair if it is the same did is show any errors on your hard drive. If it didn't find any errors then you may need to use something like DiskWarrior or Tech Tool Pro. Also try to start your system in safe mode, hold down the shift key will restarting your Mac.

My mac's screen shuts down after a prolonged spinning wheel but I can still hear the computer whirring which tells me the computer is still functioning what could this problem be. I cant get onto my computer with a black screen

I have a an Imac which the screen takes it upon itself to shut down after a prolonged spinning wheel. The computer is still working as I can hear it. I cant provide the specs as I cant see anything on my screen what could the problem be and how can I fix it. I have turned it on and off a couple of times at both the button at the back and unplugged it but this hasnt helped. Please help

Spinning wheels are not a facet of Classic operating systems. Identify your Mac with this tip:
http://discussions.apple.com/docs/DOC-6413 and post to the appropriate forum: http://discussions.apple.com/docs/DOC-2463 after checking this tip on what may be slowing you down: http://discussions.apple.com/docs/DOC-6921

When playing my music, the iMac shuts down after 5 or 6 songs. How can I lengthen the time?

When playing my music in I tunes, the iMac shuts down after 5 or 6 songs. How can I set it so it plays until I shut it off manually?

Never Mind, I figured it out.

Gray screen, spinning wheel of death?

Hi - I have poked around a little hoping someone else might have had this exact problem, and I do apologize if this has been posted before. Anyway-
My sister had a hard drive failure on her ibook G4; the Apple store just replaced her hard drive. Her symptom was the grey spinning wheel, which just kept spinning for five minutes. When I got her computer back a couple of days ago, the extra memory chip I'd gotten from OWC had been removed. The Apple techs gave us a note stating this had caused her problems.
Of course, I got worried because my trusty g3 has a similar chip in it! I'd bought them both from OWC at the same time and had someone (who was rather rough - but I couldn't get it in myself) install them for us. So I grabbed the Techtool Deluxe disk from work, booted from the disk, and ran the tests. Everything passed except that there was some volume damage. I then elected to let techtool repair the drive - which took forever. Stupidly, perhaps, I aborted the repair about 3/4 of the way through and checked my email. (It was then after midnight, and the disk had been spinning away, between tests and repair, for close to five hours.) The machine rebooted and got my mail, but was extremely sluggish. I forced mail to quit, then shut it down. But I had a bad feeling.
This morning, I tried to boot up, and got the normal chime and then the spinning wheel - for five minutes. I could hear no sounds from the hard drive.
Fortunately, I have much of my data saved to my .mac com account and to an external firewire drive. So I haven't lost everything. But I'd really like to save this little machine if I can. I thought about removing the memory chip and trying to boot, but I can't remember if it's the upper chip or the lower one! Should I try to do this? (Taking out one chip at a time?) And should I take it in to have the backup battery replaced (I've owned it for nearly four years now, and, so far as I know, the battery has never been replaced.) Is there anything else I can do, or is this machine dead?
I have the original system disks, Jaguar, and a tiger DVD - not sure, however, if I can boot it from the external dvd drive, or any disk at all at this point. The only symptoms I'd had previously were a failure to shut down after I'd backed up stuff to my idisk and one previous cranky (but perfectly normal, once it got going) startup. I'm afraid I may have made matters worse by interrupting the repair in progress. It's a dual boot g3 700 mhz, running Tiger 10.4.11. Including the possibly defective chip, it has 768 megs of ram. It's been a great machine, and I was counting on having it for another year or two. TIA for your help!

RAM can go bad after it's been working, although it's not that common. I don't think it's ever happened to me. OWC has a lifetime warranty on RAM, so your sister may want to contact OWC.
I installed Tiger from the DVD using my firewire LaCie DVD/CD writer/reader. It's the same way I've installed other programs from DVD, but I never attempted to boot the machine this way.
Since you have to boot from the installation disc to install Tiger, you must have used that external DVD drive to boot the iMac before.
If you can run boot from the Tiger DVD, do so. Then, at the first Installer screen (after language selection), go up to the Installer's menu under Utilities and select to run +Disk Utility+. Then, select the internal drive in the sidebar and run +Repair Disk+ in the +First Aid+ tab. Note if any errors are reported and, if so, see if Disk Utility was able to repair the damaged.
If Disk Utility is not able to fix the error, you can let TechTool have another shot.
Alternately, before any more repair attempts, you can do the following to try to save your data that was not backed up before attempting repair. Start up your iMac in +FireWire Target Disk Mode+.
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1661
This procedure turns your iMac into an external FireWire hard drive. Then connect it to your sister's iBook using a regular FireWire cable. The iMac's hard drive will hopefully appear on the iBook's desktop; disk directory damage sometimes prevents startup, but the drive may still be accessible if it's not the startup drive. If it does mount to the iBooks desktop, save off those important files right away.
Once you have all the files you need, the best course of action may be to erase the drive and give the iMac a fresh start.

Macbook shuts down after grey screen

My MacBook shuts down after the gray screen every time I try to start it it does not work

While we all have MacBooks in this forum most of us don’t run Mountain Lion. There's a Mountain Lion Support Community where everybody has Mountain Lion. You should also post this question there to increase your chances of getting an answer. https://discussions.apple.com/community/mac_os/os_x_mountain_lion
You should also ask this in the MacBook Pro forum. This is the forum for the white and black plastic MacBooks that were discontinued in 2010.
https://discussions.apple.com/community/notebooks/macbook_pro

IMac shut downs after Apple logo appears!

Since I installed Maverick my iMac been acting weird. Now when I turn it on it shuts down after the Apple logo appears!
I've looked for similar problems but I've other issue here, I've a login security username\password. So, I can't pick the hard driver and repair it simpley!
Any help...

Try these in order testing your system after each to see if it's back to normal:
1. a. Resetting your Mac's PRAM and NVRAM
    b. Intel-based Macs: Resetting the System Management Controller (SMC)
2. Restart the computer in Safe Mode, then restart again, normally. If this doesn't help, then:
     Boot to the Recovery HD: Restart the computer and after the chime press and hold down the
     COMMAND and R keys until the Utilities menu screen appears. Alternatively, restart the computer and
     after the chime press and hold down the OPTION key until the boot manager screen appears.
     Select the Recovery HD and click on the downward pointing arrow button.
3. Repair the Hard Drive and Permissions: Upon startup select Disk Utility from the Utilities menu. Repair the Hard Drive and Permissions as follows.
When the recovery menu appears select Disk Utility. After DU loads select your hard drive entry (mfgr.'s ID and drive size) from the the left side list. In the DU status area you will see an entry for the S.M.A.R.T. status of the hard drive. If it does not say "Verified" then the hard drive is failing or failed. (SMART status is not reported on external Firewire or USB drives.) If the drive is "Verified" then select your OS X volume from the list on the left (sub-entry below the drive entry,) click on the First Aid tab, then click on the Repair Disk button. If DU reports any errors that have been fixed, then re-run Repair Disk until no errors are reported. If no errors are reported click on the Repair Permissions button. Wait until the operation completes, then quit DU and return to the main menu. Select Restart from the Apple menu.
     Reinstall the 10.9.2 update: OS X Mavericks 10.9.2 Update (Combo).
4. Reinstall Lion/Mountain Lion, Mavericks: Reboot from the Recovery HD. Select Reinstall Lion/Mountain Lion, Mavericks from the Utilities menu, and click on the Continue button.
Note: You will need an active Internet connection. I suggest using Ethernet if possible because it is three times faster than wireless.
Reinstall the 10.9.2 update: OS X Mavericks 10.9.2 Update (Combo).

IMac shuts down after removing Mini DisplayPort to SVGA

Hi,
The last couple of years I have worked with a 27 inch iMac in combination with a HP 27 inch monitor. This monitor is connected via a Mini Displayport to SVGA connector. Because I am going to use this external monitor anymore, I disconnected it today which made my iMac shut down imediately. Then it keeps rebooting and trying to start up but shuts down again. Over and over.
The problem stops as soon as I connect the monitor again.
Anybody have any thoughts?

Hello there, TheCapGuy.
The following Knowledge Base article is a great resource for steps in troubleshooting spontaneous restarts:
OS X: When your computer spontaneously restarts or displays "Your computer restarted because of a problem."
http://support.apple.com/kb/TS4636
Thanks for reaching out to Apple Support Communities.
Cheers,
Pedro.

Macbook Pro 10.8 won't shut down. Gray screen with spinning wheel.

Previous it happened on 10.6.8 snow leppord. I thought it might be the RAM problem, so i went ahead and purchased a 16GB RAM. Now I got the RAM up running, i upgraded the computer to 10.8 mountain lion. I thought the problem should be gone by now. But somehow, it happened all over again, everytime when i use microsoft office 2011. I even quit every single app fron the Active Monitor (include Active Monitor), and wait for about 5min before shutdown, the gray screen with spinning wheel appeared again. I repair the disk from recovery HD, according to that, there is no problem anymore. But, once again it happened after i used Microsoft office 2011. Is there anyways i could fix it? I suppose uninstall it will make it work, but it's vital.

Previous it happened on 10.6.8 snow leppord. I thought it might be the RAM problem, so i went ahead and purchased a 16GB RAM. Now I got the RAM up running, i upgraded the computer to 10.8 mountain lion. I thought the problem should be gone by now. But somehow, it happened all over again, everytime when i use microsoft office 2011. I even quit every single app fron the Active Monitor (include Active Monitor), and wait for about 5min before shutdown, the gray screen with spinning wheel appeared again. I repair the disk from recovery HD, according to that, there is no problem anymore. But, once again it happened after i used Microsoft office 2011. Is there anyways i could fix it? I suppose uninstall it will make it work, but it's vital.

My iMac G5 1.6 Ghz Won't Boot. Shuts Down at Gray Screen. HELP!

Hi guys. I need some help. I have an iMac G5 that seems to be having some serious problems. It is a 17" 1.6 Ghz w/ 1GB of RAM.
The problem:
• When I press the power button, I get the beautiful Mac chime, and the LCD turns on to the gray apple screen. I get the spinning gray bars below the apple, and then...it shuts down. Sometimes it doesn't even make it to the gray screen and it shuts down.
What I have done recently/tried.
• I installed iLife '06 and all the updates a day or two before this began.
• I reset the PRAM.
• I tried booting in safe-mode...no luck.
• I tried starting from the factory CD. The drive begins to spin, and then it shuts down.
When this first happened (yesterday), I started it in safe-mode, and everything looked ok. I zapped the PRAM, and then started it up, and once again, everything looked ok. That was last night. When I got home from work tonight, none of those things worked, and I am now looking for some help from you guys. Any suggestions? Thanks, in advance, for the help.
BTW, I think I'm running 10.4, but I'm not certain because I can't start it up to tell.

See if your machine falls under the parameters of power supply or video and power issues.
Please post back and let us know,
Miriam

Always Shuts down at gray screen with spinning gear

Hi All
I think this may be a serious problem
Macbook was working fine then during downloading an app I got a message 'do you want to shutdown' i clicked cancel but re appeared with same message.
I shut down macbook and restarted and booted up to grey screen with spinning gear then off, the whole macbook switched off. I tried to reboot but everytime it switched off at the same point.
I tried to boot from DVD install disk but done the same, tried booting into safe mode but shut off at about 25% on the loading bar. Have reset everything and tried again but still the same prob.
Replaced the hard drive with a spare which had windows 7 on, still didnt allow me to boot from dvd disk but it stopped at the message ' do you want to start windows in safe mode' along with all the other options. I left it at that screen for about 45 mins and the ,acbook never switched off. So i now figured I may have a bad DVD osx disk, A frien of mine has Mountain lion on usb stick, so i borrowed and booted from the usb, got to the screen with the spinning gear and then....it switched off.
Checked fan while booting and all seems fine.
So my question is why is it shutting down, also why does it not shutdown before the spinning gear screen. It cant be over heating as above i fitted a hdd with win7 on and left it at the prompt for 45 mins.
Many thanks for looking
laurie

Hi Nance,
Welcome to the Discussions.
Put Install Disc 1 in the drive and start while holding down the "c" key. Select Disk Utility from the Installer menu, click on the drive on the left and click on Repair Disk. If it reports errors and repairs, repeat the process until no errors are reported.
Post back the results and any unrepaired error messages.
John

After iOS5, iPhone 4 shuts down and hangs with spinning wheel

This has happened twice so far. I'm not aware of any particular action that causes the problem. I know in both cases it happened while the iPhone had a good charge. Next time I looked at it, the screen showed the spinning wheel one normally sees during shutdown, but was stuck there.
I'm surprised I'm not seeing this on the forum already. Anyone else?

You're not alone Jason. I've been having this problem after the second update for iOS5. My Iphone had been working great and I became very attached to it. Maybe you and I are the only ones to have this issue?
For any future posters, I continue to have this problem after:
- restoring my phone as a new device (not restoring settings\data from backup)
- refrain from downloading any apps
- ensuring apps are turned off when not using them
This is affecting my job now where I'll probably have to buy a cheap phone to ensure my clients can always get a hold of me. If you're reading Apple....please help us.

Mac boot issue; gray screen, spinning wheel, and progress bar

Recently I shut down my Mac only to find when I tried turning it back on it was very slow and unresponsive. I proceeded to shut down a couple more times and this resulted in a gray screen upon startup with a spinning wheel, apple logo, and a progress bar. The progress bar did not fill at all at first, and as I left my laptop for about 40 minutes, it still hadn't moved. I proceeded then to boot in recovery and tried to repair my disk. This resulted in another issue, and would not repair, so I decided to just erase my HD, since there was not anything important on it anyways. I really just wanted my laptop to turn on so I could start my paper. Well it wouldn't erase my hard disk and this led to me becoming very impatient and just quitting the process. On the next attempt to boot in recovery, the hard disk doesn't even show up. Only the recovery disk (previously there were two disks as options, as well as the wifi selection). I'm now using safari through the recovery option. I'd like to simply get my computer back. If i can't get anywhere on here, i'm just going to bring it to the apple store and return it, most likely, as i've had nothing but problems with this thing. I've had it since the middle of September, and I can't hardly believe i've already encountered such an issue. Any help is much appreciated. Thanks.

I'd make a trip to the Apple Store - your hard disk may be dying (the Recovery partition is very small) or there might be something corrupt in your system. They'll be able to evaluate it.
Clinton

Gray screen, spinning wheel and nothing else

Man if it ain't one thing its another lol. just recently bought a early 2009 Mac Pro with 12 GB memory, 4 hard drives (total 8TB) stock graphics board and one superdrive (stock) and one pioneer Blue ray drive installed, the system had been running fine until I rebooted last night. I had added the program pathfinder and it was running fine before rebooting so that is the only thing I can think of that I have added to the system since the last reboot. anyway now all i get is the gray screen with the apple in the center and the spinning wheel near the bottom of the screen. I even tried rebooting holding down the "shift" key and the only difference is I got a hollow bar centered near the bottom along with the apple and spinning wheel above it. it started filling in the center and then half way through it went away and once again I was where I was with all the other attempts to boot the system. Can someone give me an idea of what is causing the problem and some possible solutions.
Thank you
Ed

OK I've tried rebooting using the shift key, no luck same gray screen and spinning wheel
tried booting using the cmd+shift= V keys, nothing at all
then I tried cmd+shift= V to watch what was happening dfuring a safe reboot and it came to the line
unable to open: /var/db/bootcache.playlist: 2 no such file or directory
then nothing. I have also disconnected all usb externals while doing all this.
I'm beginning to think that the new (boot) hard drive is having an issue and am trying to figure out how to boot from an external back up of the boot drive.

Imac shuts down after update

My iMac has begun shutting down (twice in the past day and a half) after downloading the newest update, (I didn't get OS Lion) just the new updates. I have i5 intel mac and it is less than a year old. I am just curious if anyone else is having similar issues. Also it is important to include that when I turned my cpu back on I had to unplug it from the wall first, the power button was unresponsive.

I have 2 of the same iMacs in addition to 2 macbook pros with quad cores that are very new. The latest update rearranged my bookmarks on one machine to a previous set and, more importantly, disabled a program I use to disable keylogging. On another machine, some website settings were dropped in addition to the keylogging program. The macbook pros, which are brand spanking new, also had some minor glitches. I know these guys have a lot on their plate right now since they have obviously released Lion before they fully debugged, but those of us who had sense to wait a few months for them to get things straight should not be punished by the release of a buggy update of the migration tools. Apple is such a strong company and culture that I would have expected them not to rush to unleash this Windows-like buggy set of updates and releases.
MAKE IT RIGHT, APPLE.

IMac shuts down after gray screen/spinning wheel

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