My macbook pro is stuck on grey screen with apple symbol in center with the progress circle under it continusly spinning. After I had turned it on. Prior to turning it on I had to force close and shut down a few hours prior. Please Help?

Question

My macbook pro is stuck on grey screen with apple symbol in center with the progress circle under it continusly spinning. After I had turned it on. Prior to turning it on I had to force close and shut down a few hours prior. Please Help I have tried everything I know to do

Answer 1

Unfortunately this means that there is a problem in the boot sector of your hard drive. It might be indicative of a fundamental corruption in the coding that allows your computer to boot your operating system from your hard drive. I had this problem twice and it resulted in me having to get a new hard drive and restore my data.
In other words, your computer can't talk to your operating system so you can't access your data.
Here is my advice: DON'T CALL APPLE TECH SUPPORT though they are kind and usually helpful it will take you an hour just to explain the situation and they will only tell you to do what I'm gonna say here.
First: Shut down your computer completely
Two: boot up while holding down the following keys: command, option, p, and r. The computer will reboot 3 times. This solution will likely fail so if you're frustrated skip to the next step.
Three: Boot up while holding down the option key. Select recovery drive. Select your default language. Select disk utility, click on Macintosh HD, and select "verify and repair volume." Likely the verification will produce some line like "unused node not erased." Or something like that. If anything using the words "node structure" comes up, you need a new hard drive.
If after verification and repairs you still can't boot I sincerely hope you have apple care because you will need a new hard drive. Set up an appointment to come in to the apple store, they will tell you to go and get data recovery, just ask them to give you the old hard drive. Unless you have an up to date backup in which case you can just restore from that. If you're lucky the only issue is with the boot sector which means that if you ask them to give you the old hard drive, you can buy an enclosure and you have effectively been given a free external hard drive. It still works to store data just not to load an operating system.
If you have a back up drive bring it to the apple store and they'll do the whole thing right there, it should take around an hour and a half but may take longer.
Hope this helps, it's annoying but it's your safest bet.
All the best.