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

Question

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.

Answer 1

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.