Apple/Grey Screen Stuck - Disk utility - back up

Hello,
So I was on my computer and it randomly turned off and turned back on and stayed on the apple/grey screen. I've done the vram reset and ended up where I can boot up the installation disk. I've gotten to where I can access the disk utility and repair/verify disk permissions but ended up getting the error code: 'Error: no valid packages.' From my hard drive, all I need are pictures and videos that I had just backed up the day before. Could someone help me (easiest way for me to follow is through steps) on how to just back up specific files or folders (i.e. pictures folders)??
Thanks again for your help!
Chad

.Create a data recovery/undelete external boot drive

Similar Messages

Grey screen; No Disk Utility on my 10.5 Retail DVD?

My powerbook will not start up; it gets stuck on the grey screen with the spinning wheel. I had successfully been running 10.5.4 for several weeks. I am afraid the HD is broken, cause I'm hearing a strange noise. Computer is about 4-5 years old.
I can get to the disk utility from the DVD (disk 1) that came with the computer, but this is not the OS X I'm running (disk says 10.3.4), and I'm afraid to let it do any repairs.
From the retail DVD that I installed Leopard from, there is no disk utility in the Installer menu. My only options are About and Exit OSX Installer.
1. Does it sound right that the Leopard DVD does not have the disk utility?
2. Should I try to repair from the old DVD?
3. Should I try the fsck steps?
4. Or should I just take it to an apple store and let them try?
TIA for any suggestions.

If your hard drive is making noises and disk utility cant fix it you need professional data recover software you need to take it to a data recovery service.
Or get a new drive and restore it from your backup.
however a volume header repair and directory repari can be done using diskwarrior from alsfoft

Time machine greyed out in disk utility

I want to erase a time machine backup to use the HD on a different system, yet it's greyed out in disk utility.
The HD still works fine and I can restore files from it and time machine itself still works backing up to it.
I cannot however erase it using disk utility.
Here's a screenshot.
What am I doing wrong?

You've got other problems in addition to the Erase being grayed out.
The menu icons at the top are not right either. The Info, Burn and Eject menu items should be active also.
I'd suggest quitting Disk Utility, reboot your system and trying again.
Post back if that doesn't fix it.
regards

Time Machine drive icon greyed out in Disk utility

Hi I'm using a 1TB WD Electronics external drive which is partitioned (265GIG used so far)
Macbook Pro btw
i use one half as a regular external drive and one half to take care of TM back ups
i recently plugged in the drive and the Time Machine back up has failed and there's no TM icon on the desktop and the TM partition is greyed out in Disk utility
i've turned TM off at the moment
any ideas to get TM running again?
thanks
Sam

Disconnect the drive and reconnect it. Any change? If not, test it with another Mac.

After i enter my password for the wifi in internet recovery mode it just shows a blank screen no disk utility shows why??? NEED HELP

After i enter my password for the wifi in internet recovery mode it just shows a blank screen no disk utility shows why??? NEED HELP

Enter your admin passwrod, not Wi-Fi network password.

My White Macbook is stuck at the loading screen, and disk utility, safe mode doesn't work either. What should I do?

I went on vacation a few days ago and in El Salvador, they have this mobile broadband sticks. Well, I was using one until it gave me a network error. After that, it shut down my computer entirely. The first time it happened, I didn't think much of it. I took the battery out and put it back in for it could work. It happened another two times, and after the third time, my MacBook stays stuck at the loading screen, and it will take 5-10 minutes on that screen, before it shuts down, or it wouldn't turn on at all. I've tried booting into safe mode, but it appears to not boot into it. I've tried resetting the Pram, and using disk utility, but that still won't work. I don't know what else to do to make it boot into OS X Lion.
I'm an AP student, and the majority of my work is in that computer, and it is very important! What can I do? Not only that, but I enter school in a few weeks and I need the AP work by the time I enter.
What can I do? Can someone help?
Thanks

Reinstalling Lion Without the Installer
Boot to the Recovery HD: Restart the computer and after the chime press and hold down the COMMAND and R keys until the menu screen appears. Alterhatively, 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.
Repair the Hard Drive and Permissions: Upon startup select Disk Utility from the main 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.
Reinstall Lion: Select Reinstall Lion and click on the Continue button.
Note: You can also re-download the Lion installer by opening the App Store application. Hold down the OPTION key and click on the Purchases icon in the toolbar. You should now see an active Install button to the right of your Lion purchase entry. There are situations in which this will not work. For example, if you are already booted into the Lion you originally purchased with your Apple ID or if an instance of the Lion installer is located anywhere on your computer.

Stuck on grey screen and can't back up my HD

Im on Macbook Pro, Mountain Lion. I've been stuck at the grey loading screen, making every attempt to backup my HD. I have an external HD im trying to copy everything over to but everytime I try to create New Image, it gives me the permission error -61. Sometimes when I repair the Disk it tells me "Macintosh HD appears to be OK." Then the next time I run it, it tells me "Error: Disk Utlitly can't repair this disk. Back up as many files...." I have also repaired permissions and it repairs a few, but still does not allow me to copy my files over. I had no Time Machine backups. Is there anything else I should be doing, or have I lost all my files?

.Create a data recovery/undelete external boot drive

Grey bar at startup - Mac HD is greyed out in Disk Utility - Can't be repaired? Need to salvage my data!

Mac Book Pro -
My MacBook Pro (2008 Model) has been unable to start up - upon the start up screen when the grey Apple logo appears, I get a loading bar below it.
After about 15-20 minutes when the bar is almost complete the machine shuts off. There seems to be no way around it.
So I booted up my laptop in recovery mode, and opened Disk Utility to check my if there was something wrong with my drives -
my Macintosh HD (under the TOSHIBA drive) is greyed out. When I hit verify/repair it returns error messages and it remains greyed out.
I tried multiple times and a few times it stopped being greyed out on the sidebar, but even then it wouldn't let me verify or repair.
Not backing up my data recently is my obvious fault here, but I just wanted to know if there is ANY way to salvage my data.
Things I've tried:
1) Recovery Mode
     -Veryify/Disk Repair doesn't work
     -Time Machine can't seem to access my HD either (greyed out)
2) TargetDisk mode
     -I connected my MacBook Pro via firewire to my Mac Pro in TargetDisk mode and no Hardrive shows up on my finder.
Any advice appreciated, going to try and take it to a tech shop on Monday.
Thank you!

I would take out the HDD and install it in an enclosure and then connect that to the Mac Pro and see if there is any success.
If not, then look for data recovery software on the Internet. Most will have a 'trial' version that will indicate if the software will be successful or not, so you do not have to commit funds without knowing if it will work or not.
The last option is a professional recovery service. There will be no guarantees of success and the costs will be very high.
Ciao.

Volumes Greyed out in disk utility

tried to do averify and repair disk when it finished the volumes/partitions are greyed out

Where are you running Disk Utility from - the boot
system, or an installation disk?
from the actual system yea, I understand about thenot being able to unmount a volume you are on but the disks that were doing it were not the system disk so I was able to do repair and verify disk to mount/unmount, they would go through fine but the volume would stay greyed out not the actual disk itself. One is a int HD the other was a ext FW 400 drive. I have haad a lot fo problems laltely so if you want to read all the thiings that have happened here they are. OH thanks so much for your help
OK before I forget the way all this happened I will write it all down so here it is.
I was trying to hook up a ethernet conn to a muse receptor (music gear)I realized after I wasnt successful setting it up that my main Macintosh HD was missing from the desktop , When I would do a search I would see it and could acess it but it was greyed out. I did repair perm it was ok. I tried moving it to the sidebar ,no luck. I then installed a OS x on an ext HD and repaired and verified the disc that way to unount and remount all was good. WEnt back to real Os ,still not there. Then SOmeone in an email said to run a apple script
"System Events"
set visible of (choose folder with invisibles) to false
end tell when I did I then realized that now my other HD is missing from my desktop and I also accidentally made it go poof from the side bar too. now if I go to finder and try to hit show HD nothing happened.
SOMEONE PLEASE HELP!
More info if I do command shift G for , /Volumes/Macintosh HD/ it goes to a shortcut for it and if I do it for the Audi HD I get a short cut to it but this time it is a network shortcut icon
Also My iDisk which I never use is stuck on my desktop and cant get rid of it
I think what happened is maybe I got my user and my main hard drive volume switched up cause if I look into that Macintosh HD and go to users/myname/desktop it looks the same as my current desktop
OBviously these are all guesses
Update
Now when I hit the audio shortcut Icon it says it cant be found and to insert the disk or connect to the sever volume and wait for it to appear on the desktop
Matt

Start up problem-can't get past Apple grey screen and spinning gear

Upon trying to start up my laptop, got nothing but the apple logo, grey screen and spinning gear. I tried several things to resolve the problem on my own (hardware test said it could not verify the disk/could not start up from the OS X install disk/reset the power mgmt. unit/disconnected all peripherals)and finally went to the Apple store. Genius bar said they were able to start up from their hard drive and suggested that I buy an external hard drive, go home, start up again and back up all files. I bought a My Book. Got home and same thing happened: Apple logo and spinning gear. I am an Apple user of 18 years, but have not had to do much in the way of diagnostics. Have tried fsck routine today that I found on another posting here today. If the Genius guy got it going, I assumed that I could too. I was wrong. Any advice would be appreciated. It looks like this is the end of the road for my Powerbook, but I'd like a shot at recovering data.
Message was edited by: Debbie Wach

Hi Debbie/Gregg -
I may have missed something but can't you just put a new hard drive in your laptops? You may not be able to recover your data but it doesn't mean the end for your computer. The same thing happened to my TiBook and I put a new 120Gig hard drive in and it's had a new lease of life.
I bought a new internal hard drive along with an external enclosure and connected it up to my computer and from there cloned it. Then I transferred the external into the TiBook and put the old drive into the external and I use that as an external now. I realise your hard drives are dead but you could use another computer to so the same thing and just install the OS on it.
I bought this -
http://www.macupgrades.co.uk/store/productinfo.php?productsid=452
Then followed the instructions here -
http://www.ifixit.com/Guide/Mac/PowerBook-G4-Ti-DVI/HD-Replacement/33/6/
Once your new hard drive is installed you may be able to try and repair the old one in the external enclosure?

Wont boot past grey screen after disk access was changed

I have a new 13" macbook pro with OS X Lion. I changed the hard disk access from read only to no access, walked away for a minute, when I came back my computer screen was black. Upon touching the mouse pad the mouse arrow showed up but the screen stayed black. I preformed a hard shutdown and when turning it back on it wont load past the grey screen with the apple logo. Ideas? Solutions? Please help.
Thanks

please explain exactly what you did.

Bootcamp partition shows up as grey "disk0s4" in Disk Utility

Hello everyone,
So I am a few days into this tiring and discouraging process of trying to get my iMac back to it's original working state. Here's to hoping for a solution:
Ever since I bought my iMac, I've been running OSX Mountain Lion with Win7 installed through BootCamp, without any problems. I recently wanted to increase my Boot Camp partition size from 80GB to 149GB because I was running low on disk space, and that was the start of many problems to come.
Here's what I tried first:
Make a backup copy of my OSX partition through Disk Utility's "Restore" tab (onto external HD 1)
Make a backup copy of my Windows partition through "Create a system image" in Windows Control Panel (onto external HD 2)
Use WinClone to backup a copy of my Windows partition
Erase Boot Camp partition in Disk Utility
Resize Mac OS partition to max
Create new FAT partition (149 GB)
Restore WinClone backup to the FAT partition (hoping it'll "fill up" the remaining free space)
I don't remember all the details, but all of this led to Windows not being able to boot properly, and then soon after, OS X wouldn't work either. The built-in Recovery HD somehow became unusable and showed up as grey in Disk Utility (too chaotic to remember how). After much trial and error, I was left with the Mac's built in Internet Recovery option, which I used to reinstall OS X Mountain Lion (on top of the existing Mac partition). Afterward, I regained the Recovery HD, and resized the Mac OS X partition to cover over the unusable free space that remained.
After that:
Ran Boot Camp Assistant to start the Windows installation process from scratch.
After the installation finished, I used "System Image Recovery" from a bootable Windows Recovery USB that I created.
Upon restart, Windows would not boot (which was fixed using the bootrec commands within Command Prompt off the USB).
This allowed Windows to boot fine, and it was exactly as it was before this all began.
Now, here are my current problems.
I believe the simplest way to achieve my original goal of extending my Windows partition would be to use Paragon's Camptune X, but upon running it, it tells me it can't find any Bootcamp configuration on my system.
While both OSX and Windows appear on the Startup Manager when I hold down the "option" key (which boot and run just fine), the "BOOTCAMP" partition that I would normally see in Disk Utility (under Macintosh HD) is now listed as "disk0s4", is grey, and "unmounted". It's also listed as MS-DOS (FAT), while it shows up as NTFS within Windows.
The Startup Disk preference pane lists Macintosh HD as the only choice.
I'm exhausted from the past week of repeated backup/reinstallations and trying to make this work. I've done my share of research and reading related forum threads, with no real solution. I am hoping "The hatter" will see this, as he's offered much info/advice on this topic on these boards, but I still haven't been able to resolve this issue.
Thanks for reading, anyone have any ideas?

By using Disk Utility to try to resize your Bootcamp partition you messed up your hard disk. You need to backup all your data from the disk, eraze and format your disk, and reinstall OSx, then if you want a new Bootcamp partition run Bootcamp Assistant.
Next time you want to resize the Bootcamp partition use CampTune, not Disk Utility.

Time machine disk grayed out in Disk Utility - back up not working

The disk does not show in Time Machine.
In Disk Utility it shows but is grayed out. Tried to repair disk. Got message that disk cannot be repaired. Tells me to back up and erase the disk. Not sure how to back it up if it is not being recognized. Disk Verify says the volume is corrupt and needs to be repaired. But Repair Disk doesn't work!
I can go into Time Machine and shows me one entry -- the one from the last successful back up.
The disk is a WD MyBook. Map scheme GUID Partition. Do you think the reformat will work? Is there a way if I can tell if the disk is bad? Tech Tools for Apple Care doesn't recognize the volume either.
Any ideas?

It turns out the fix for this was to just then remove the Aperture library from the exclusion list. Once I did that Time Machine did a massive 200GB backup of my entire Aperture library and everything is running fine since.
No idea what caused the problem in the first place still.

Permissions buttons greyed out in disk utility

In the disk utility, the "verify permissions" and "repair permissions" buttons are greyed out no matter which disk is selected in the left-hand pane. Does anyone know why this is so and/or what alternative ways there are of repairing permissions?
The problem persists whether I start the computer from the recovery system (command-r) or not.
Thanks.

Hi again and thanks for bearing with me!
I haven't done any cleanup, however there are only a couple of files in /Library/Receipts/, all very old, so I'm guessing the receipts are kept elsewhere after OS X 10.5, since the KB article you referred me to explicitly refers to pre- 10.5 systems.
The disk utility log in console and the info in the disk utility itself both give exactly the same info, which is basically what you’ve given:
          Owners Enabled :           Yes
          Can Turn Owners Off :           Yes
          Can Repair Permissions :           Yes
          Can Be Verified :           Yes
          Can Be Repaired :           Yes
          Can Be Formatted :           Yes
          Bootable :           Yes
          Supports Journaling :           Yes
          Journaled :           Yes
          Disk Number :           0
          Partition Number :           2
If I understand correctly, this would all mean that I should be able to click “verify permissions” in the disk utility, but for some mysterious reason I cannot.
However, in the KB article (http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1452) I notice it says “While started from an installation disc in Mac OS X v10.5 and later, a user's home directory permissions can be reset using the "Reset Password" utility.” Does this mean that if I use the reset password utility I can reset permissions and therefore not need to use the repair permissions function of the disk utility? Or is this something completely unrelated to what I’m trying to do?
I really appreciate your help very much - the only reason I wanted to repair permissions was that it was one of the recommended solutions to a problem I’ve had with microsoft office, which thankfully has now been solved after reinstalling os x and office, but it still bugs me that the option to repair permissions seems unavailable!
Anyway, it's not the end of the world if it can't be solved, you've helped me learn a lot in the process!
George

When trying to format my internal hard drive, it's greyed out in Disk utility?

I'm trying ot format my computer and wipe everything off before giving it away, but Disk Utility has everything greyed out and won't let me choose my hard drive. I have the original CD and everything that came with the computer. How do I fix this fast?

Clean Install of Snow Leopard
Be sure to make a backup first because the following procedure will erase
the drive and everything on it.
     1. Boot the computer using the Snow Leopard Installer Disc or the Disc 1 that came
         with your computer. Insert the disc into the optical drive and restart the computer.
         After the chime press and hold down the "C" key. Release the key when you see
         a small spinning gear appear below the dark gray Apple logo.
     2. After the installer loads select your language and click on the Continue
         button. When the menu bar appears select Disk Utility from the Utilities menu.
         After DU loads select the hard drive entry from the left side list (mfgr.'s ID and drive
         size.) Click on the Partition tab in the DU main window. Set the number of
         partitions to one (1) from the Partitions drop down menu, click on Options button
         and select GUID, click on OK, then set the format type to MacOS Extended
         (Journaled, if supported), then click on the Apply button.
     3. When the formatting has completed quit DU and return to the installer. Proceed
         with the OS X installation and follow the directions included with the installer.
     4. When the installation has completed your computer will Restart into the Setup
         Assistant. Be sure you configure your initial admin account with the exact same
         username and password that you used on your old drive. After you finish Setup
         Assistant will complete the installation after which you will be running a fresh
         install of OS X. You can now begin the update process by opening Software
         Update and installing all recommended updates to bring your installation current.
Download and install Mac OS X 10.6.8 Update Combo v1.1.

Apple/Grey Screen Stuck - Disk utility - back up

Similar Messages

Maybe you are looking for