Grey Screen and Chime

Hello,

I have read a lot of this happening to people but none seem to be exactly like mine so I want to double check before going further.

Last night, I was using my 2.5 year old Macbook and it froze while using Safari. I therefore turned it off and when I rebooted all it did was the chime in the beggining then stoped a grey screen. No keys were working and all I could see was a cursor, I then insert all the 10.4 CD as 10.5 CD's with no luck.

Is this a HD fail and therefore do I need a knew one? I am still on warrantly but do to a liquid spill they will charge more than a new hard drive to check it out so if I can verify it is a HD fail then it will just save me money to buy one and install myself. Any help, comments?

You didn't say whether or not you could boot the machine from either the Tiger or Leopard DVD? Did you try?

Usually when the HDD fails, a folder with a question mark will appear on the screen.

In the meantime, try resetting the PRAM and NVRAM. Link

Regards.

I put all three of the CD's in and none of them booted up. Do you have to press a button at all before or during when you put them in?

I did the PRAM and NVRAM reset and after leaving it on the grey screen for a couple minutes a folder with a question mark does appear. Is tat conformation of HD failure?

1506help said:

I put all three of the CD's in and none of them booted up. Do you have to press a button at all before or during when you put them in?

Click to expand...

Correct me if I'm wrong but I believe you have to hold down on "c" while startup chime is going.

Did you try removing the battery for 10 seconds and placing it back in? If that doesn't work try taking out the RAM in your machine and placing it back. I get the gray screen and the chime every now and then, think it's because of Boot Camp but I just take out the battery wait and put it back in. Works like a charm. :-D

Did you get this problem fixed. I have the same problem and would like to know how to fix it. My Macbook starts up, the chime rings, blank white screen - no apple logo, I can hear a whirring noise (from the HD?), none of the key works. Tried booting from (grey) OS install disk 1 (version 10.5.4) that came with the computer, but no success. Reset PRAM, etc. Only thing that "works" is I get a cursor arrow when I start up while pressing the "Option" key.

Thoughts anyone? Thanks.

pull the battery and hold the power button down for 5 seconds.

Put battery back in and hold down p, r, cmd, ctrl (or is it alt) then turn the power on.

Once the thing turns on if it's still not working close the screen and force it into sleep. then pull it out of sleep.

See if that works, and let us know.

Command (one with little Apple logo, or Alt) Option P and R all together immediately after the chime, and hold down until re-chimes three times and release.