Grey screen and osx utilities only

After upgrading from mountain lion to yosemite, my mac doesnt work,
i have a grey screen and osx utilities only, I have tried all the suggestions
and nothing has solved the problem. My mac is 6 weeks old, and i cant use it.
I changed to mac to eliminate problems, but seem to have more complicated ones.
Can anyone help please

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After installing Mavericks my MacBook Pro and my MacMini can't shut down, only a grey screen and finish. Must be killed by the power button. Why?

After installing Mavericks my MacBook Pro and my MacMini can't shut down, only a grey screen and finish. Must be killed by the power button. Why?
Nach der Installation von Mavericks kann ich weder das MacBook Pro (2 x 2.4 GHz) noch den MacMini (2 x 2.66 GHz) herunterfahren. Es bleibt ein dauerhafter grauer Bildschirm. Nach 20 min habe ich einen erzwungenen Neustart durchgeführt.
Ausserdem startet die Macs wesentlich langsamer als mit OS X 10.6.8.

same here... sometimes it works, most of the time it doesn't!!

Hi guys, problem with grey screen and flashing question mark. on top of it while in utility, i'm unable to verify, verify disc permission or repair disc0 which is obviously my main hd. any ideas where to go from here? tried to reistall osx but no luck.

hi guys, problem with grey screen and flashing question mark. should be straight forward affair but on top of it while in disc utility, i'm unable to verify, verify disc permission, repair or even erase disc0 which is obviously my main hd. any ideas where to go from here? tried to reinstall osx but no luck, stucked when asked to chose location to install osx. would really apreciate any kind of help with this cause i'm quite new mac user. ty

If you don't have a backup, read this:
https://discussions.apple.com/docs/DOC-1689

Grey screen and clicking sound at start up

Lately when I start up my mac it takes about 6 tries to get it to start. The first few times before it works there is just a plain grey screen and there is a clicking noise being made. Any ideas on what is going on and how to fix this?

Hello and Welcome to Apple Discussions.
I hope I am not being overly alarmist but I believe your hard disk is set to fail at any moment. Use the computer as little as possible. Get hold of an external firewire hard disk. Connect to the iMac and then boot the iMac from your OS X install disc. Install a fresh copy of Leopard onto the external drive. You can now use the iMac from the external drive only by setting the External drive as the boot volume in System Preferences > Startup Disk.
Now in order of personal value transfer your documents and files across to the external drive. Once you have good backups you should then take a look at Disk Utility (Utilities folder) and see what SMART status the drive is being reported as.
mrtotes
Message was edited by: mrtotes

Ibookg4 will not go past the grey screen and will not accept a disc

my ibook will not go past the grey screen and will not accept a disc

Have you tried starting up in Safe Mode? If not, I suggest that you give it a try. This will take quite awhile longer than a normal startup because it does a file check and repair of the hard disk.
If this works you will see your normal desktop. Once completely started up in Safe Mode, try to restart normally, and go to Applications > Utilities > Disk Utility. Click on the top hard drive icon in the left sidebar and note the S.M.A.R.T. status at the bottom right of the pane. What does it say?
Select the named boot volume in the left sidebar, ("Macintosh HD" unless you've renamed it). What is the hard drive capacity and how much space remains available on it? Repair permissions on it.
See if you are able to do a little hard drive maintenance to help things out.

How can I get rid of The Grey screen and boot my macbook?

Today I was on my MacBook Pro (bought July 2011) and it went to a blank blue screen. I powered it off and tried to restart it. It loaded the apple and spinning circle but it went to a grey screen and froze there. I've read and tried a lot of different things already but nothing has worked. I did the hardware test and it found no problems. I tried to safeboot it. I tried everything on here: http://support.apple.com/kb/TS2570 except the last suggestion (I'd rather not have to lose all my files unless absolutely nesseccary). I also tried the "hold Command + R keys" to try and get to utilities. Anything else out there that I could try? Not sure what the exact operating system is either.

I wouldn't assume that's the hard drive. The fact that the screen turned blue all of a sudden isn't necessarily an indication of a hard drive failure. Check out this post I made yesterday:
https://discussions.apple.com/message/21756819#21756819
My personal opinion would be to try and boot from an external hard drive with the appropriate OS installed. With a 2011 model, I would assume that should be Snow Leopard or later. AHT doesn't catch everything, and I don't know if it even does drive scans for bad blocks. I do know for a fact that it pretty much limits itself to digital interfaces and can't go beyond analog driver stages. For example, if the driver stages of a FireWire port or ethernet port are blown, AHT will report them as being OK.
If you got hit by a transient, which could indicate an internal supply problem or a line problem if you were connected to the internet via a wired connection or you were running off the charger, there's no telling what it might have caused the drive to do (if it's the drive) and it could easily cause the screen to suddenly go to blue, but what other damage was done?
My point is that you need to confirm what the source of the problems are. If there's a logic board problem, your drive and data may be OK. If the drive is bad, some of it may still be recoverable. The problem may very well be drive related, but I wouldn't go out and start throwing money at new parts without first confirming what the cause of the problems is.
Hope this helped, and good luck.

Grey screen and artifacts in VLC playing h264

I have the problem that when I watch h264 encoded Videos in VLC I get a grey screen and alot of Artifacts every now and then.
I looked in the output and get sth like this when an error occurs
[h264 @ 0x7f3884cb08e0] reference picture missing during reorder
[h264 @ 0x7f3884cb08e0] reference picture missing during reorder
[h264 @ 0x7f3884cb08e0] reference picture missing during reorder
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[h264 @ 0x7f3884cb08e0] Missing reference picture, default is 14
[h264 @ 0x7f3884cb08e0] Missing reference picture, default is 14
[h264 @ 0x7f3884cb08e0] reference picture missing during reorder
[h264 @ 0x7f3884cb08e0] reference picture missing during reorder
[h264 @ 0x7f3884cb08e0] reference picture missing during reorder
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[h264 @ 0x7f3884cb1260] reference picture missing during reorder
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The Videos work fine in Smplayer and Kodi. The problem only occurs in VLC.
I dont really know how to fix this, any help is appreciated

same here

Grey screen and no sound when i play digital copy

i recently bought a copy of "family guy: something, something dark side" andd it came with a digital copy disc so i can put it on my itunes. i followed all the steps and downloaded it but when it came to playing it all i got was a grey screen and no sound, plus when i try to transfer it to my ipod it says my computer is unauthorised when it is... i done some research and it seems a common problem but i have updated my software on my itunes, ipod and quickplayer and still it doesnt work. im pretty fed up of this and i want a solution to this problem that acctuly works...

The solution to your problem should be the following.
As found in the I-tunes help section:
"If you double-click a video in iTunes but it doesn't play, check the following:.......
......To play videos purchased from the iTunes Store, you must have QuickTime 7.1.3 or later. You can download the latest version of QuickTime from the QuickTime website (click the link below) or by choosing Apple menu > Software Update.
You can't edit videos purchased from the iTunes Store. Videos purchased from the store can be viewed only in iTunes and QuickTime Player.
Open
QuickTime website
Was this page helpful? Send feedback."
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Grey screen and cranking noise

My screen froze and started making cranking noises. I turned it off. Now, when I turn it on, it shows the grey screen and makes a ton of noise. Help!

Is the loud noise coming from the right of the trackpad? If so that may indicate a disk crash. Check the following.
Boot in Recovery Mode.
http://www.apple.com/osx/recovery/
If it boots in standard recovery mode then at least part of your internal disk is working.
If it boots in network recovery mode then your internal disk may be damaged but the rest of you Mac may be healthy.
If it boots in Recovery Mode or Network Recovery Mode:
Run Disk Utility. This will check if the disk and filesystem are healthy.
Click on the upper left disk icon.
(If there is no upper left icon then your disk has crashed.)
Does the S.M.A.R.T. status say “Verified”.
If not the disk/SSD is unhealthy and needs to be replaced.
Click on the icon indented below, usually called “Macintosh HD”.
Verify Disk.
If it finishes with a green “OK” message then all is well with the disk.
If it shows errors in red then you may have found the problem.
If it has not crashed you may want to backup or do an emergency data copy before proceeding.
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TS2570 when i turn on my computer it stays on the grey screen and then turns off by itself. How can I fix that?

when i turn on my computer it stays on the grey screen and then turns off by itself. How can I fix that?

Hi , and a warm welcome to the forums!
Could be many things, we should start with this...
"Try Disk Utility
1. Insert the Mac OS X Install disc, then restart the computer while holding the C key.
2. When your computer finishes starting up from the disc, choose Disk Utility from the Installer menu at top of the screen. (In Mac OS X 10.4 or later, you must select your language first.)
*Important: Do not click Continue in the first screen of the Installer. If you do, you must restart from the disc again to access Disk Utility.*
3. Click the First Aid tab.
4. Select your Mac OS X volume.
5. Click Repair Disk, (not Repair Permissions). Disk Utility checks and repairs the disk."
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=106214
Then try a Safe Boot, (holding Shift key down at bootup), run Disk Utility in Applications>Utilities, then highlight your drive, click on Repair Permissions, reboot when it completes.
(Safe boot may stay on the gray radian for a long time, let it go, it's trying to repair the Hard Drive & clear caches.)
If perchance you can't find your install Disc, at least try it from the Safe Boot part onward.
If 10.7.0 or later...
Bootup holding CMD+r, or the Option/alt key to boot from the Restore partition & use Disk Utility from there to Repair the Disk, then Repair Permissions.
Hold alt or option key at bootup, do asny boot choices show up?

20" imac won't start up-flashes between blank grey screen and black screen

20" imac
2GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
Was running system 10.5.8 just fine. Worked great.
But then I wanted to give the imac to a relative. And so, I tried to boot from the original grey mac install dvd to wipe the hardrive and set the imac back to factory specs.
But it wouldn't boot off the dvd. All It would do at restart was to flash slowly back and forth between blank grey screen and black screen. So, I tried the Leopard update dvd. Same results. So I zapped the pram and tried again. Same results.
If I just pushed the start button tho.. the imac would start right up and run fine. However, I didn't want to give it to someone else with all our information on it.
I finally restarted it and held the "T" key to turn it into a giant firewire drive, hooked it up to our other 20" imac, and used the disk utility from the second imac to erase the drive of the first imac. Then I inserted the grey install dvd into the second imac and selected the drive of the first imac and ran the install process.
Now, the first imac won't start up at all. Just a continual grey screen for a bit, than a couple of buzz sounds in the machine and then the black screen... than back again.
It ran great before I erased the drive and re-installed OS 10.5
What's wrong? How do I get the machine to either boot off the install cd?

So, I've figured out a little more on the first machine. It's a 20" 2.6 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo running 10.5.8.
It ran great. But, I wanted to erase the hard drive and reinstall the OS system before giving it to a relative.
I found that although the optical drive would read and write to normal cds and dvds, the machine would NOT boot from the grey start-up disks I had on hand. ( I have two imacs, and I tried both sets of dvds without success.)
I zapped the PRAM, and used disk utilities via firewire connection from my other 20" imac to check the hardrive and make repairs. Disk Utilities couldn't find any problems. So, using disk utilities from the other imac, I erased the first imac's harddrive and then used the install dvds on the second imac to install the original OS to the hard drive of the first imac.
(looking on the hard drive of the first imac, I can see all the contents)
However, the first machine will not start up. It just switches from grey....to black..... then grey..... and then black again.... over and over
Why won't it boot from the newly installed OS on it's own hard drive?
And Why won't it boot from the original install dvds?
How can I get it to start up again?

After my latest update my music wont load on ipad i just get a blank grey screen and no music titles yet when i check usage it says music is there, ive tried unsync it then redoing and still nothing

after my latest update my music wont load on ipad i just get a blank grey screen and no music titles yet when i check usage it says music is there, ive tried unsync it then redoing and still nothing

Rebooting will not make you lose any content. Rebooting is when you hold the home button and the sleep button down at the same time until the Apple logo appears on the screen.
You can these suggestions. One might work for you.
Make sure that you do not have a stalled download in iTunes - a song or podcast .... if you have a download in there that did not finish, complete that one first. Only one thing can download at a time on the iPad so that could be what is causing the problem.
If that doesn't work - sign out of your account, restart the iPad and then sign in again.
Settings>Store>Apple ID. Tap your ID and sign out. Restart the iPad by holding down on the sleep button until the red slider appears and then slide to shut off. To power up hold the sleep button until the Apple logo appears and let go of the button.
Go back to Settings>Store>Sign in and then try to update again. Tap one waiting icon only if necessary to start the download stream.

Macbook pro stuck on grey screen and making buzzing noise

hi,
Lately my mac has been playing up (1 year old), ever now and then it would make a funny buzzing noise, coming from the left side.. and i noticed it was running slower than usual. Im Running Mountain Lion and have 566GB of disk space left... after using it for about 5 minutes the buzzing noise would start and it would become unresposive with the spiral beach ball. So i would have to hard restart it. Now ever time i turn it on it gets to a grey screen and doesnt load further. eventually the sound starts again!! i have tried starting it in safe mode and verifying my disk in utilities where everything "seems to be ok" !! someone please help!!!

Ethan997,
define “an average disk”.
Your question regarding fault is akin to asking “is it my fault or the car maker’s fault that my spark plugs no longer work?” — disks, like spark plugs, don’t last forever, and fault doesn’t come into it. Similarly, the fact that your disk (or spark plugs) worked yesterday and doesn’t work today is not a sudden “breakage” — by their nature, they have a finite, variable amount of time in which they do work. This is why (in the case of disks) making regular backups is important; when the disk stops working, you’ll have an easy way to recover from such a situation.
That being said, if your MacBook Pro is still under warranty, you should be able to get a replacement disk from Apple. And even if it isn’t, you could still try reformatting your current disk, to see if you can squeeze some more use out of it — but if the reformatted volume keeps needing to be repaired (and you have the patience to deal with recovering from the same situation again and again), that’s a sure sign that a new disk would be your best option.

Why does my Mac boot with a Grey screen and a globe?

Why does my Mac boot with a Grey screen and a globe?

Usually means you don't have a bootable system installed so the OS is looking for a bootable system on the network.
Does the computer eventually start up shortly after the globe appears? If so then open Startup Disk preferences, select your boot volume and click on the Restart button. If this is not the case then you need to reinstall Snow Leopard.
Reinstall OS X without erasing the drive
Do the following:
1. Repair the Hard Drive and Permissions
Boot from your Snow Leopard Installer disc. 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 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 installer.
If DU reports errors it cannot fix, then you will need Disk Warrior and/or Tech Tool Pro to repair the drive. If you don't have either of them or if neither of them can fix the drive, then you will need to reformat the drive and reinstall OS X.
2. Reinstall Snow Leopard
If the drive is OK then quit DU and return to the installer. Proceed with reinstalling OS X. Note that the Snow Leopard installer will not erase your drive or disturb your files. After installing a fresh copy of OS X the installer will move your Home folder, third-party applications, support items, and network preferences into the newly installed system.
Download and install the Combo Updater for the version you prefer from support.apple.com/downloads/.

My macbook has question mark flashing on a grey screen and no functions, my macbook has question mark flashing on a grey screen and no functions

Hi
My MacBook has a question mark flashing on a grey screen and no functions, help?

That folder with the question mark icon means that the MacBook can't find the boot directory. That can either mean it can't find the hard drive or the Operating System data on the hard drive is somehow corrupted.
Put your install DVD into the optical drive and reboot. As soon as you hear the boot chime, hold down the "c" key on your keyboard (or the Option key until the Install Disk shows up). That will force your MacBook to boot from the install DVD in the optical drive.
When it does start up, you'llsee a panel asking you to choose your language. Just press the Return key on your keyboard once. It will then present you with an Installation window. Completely ignore this window and click on Utilities in the top menu and scroll down to Disk Utility and click it. When it comes up is your Hard Drive in the list on the left?
If it is then click on the Mac OS partition of your hard drive in the left hand list. Then select the First Aid Tab and run Repair Disk. The Repair Disk button won't be available until you've clicked on the Mac OS partition on your hard drive. If that repairs any problems run it again until the green OK appears and then run Repair Permissions.
If your hard drive isn’t recognized in Disk Utility then your hard drive is probably dead.

Grey screen and osx utilities only

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