stuck on grey screen with spinning wheel

well - this is the 4th time this has happened to me this month and its getting ridiculous. the past 3 times its been freezing on my regular updates...then when i go to restart because nothing is responding, it gets stuck on the grey screen with the apple logo and the spinning wheel. THIS TIME....i install parallels on my macbook leopard and its working fine up until today (have only had it 3 days). it's going slow to the point where its about to stop responding so i restart. i had a feeling it was going to give me the grey screen for some reason and just my luck...it did. im at my parents house for christmas and i do not have my disks with me. i have done the restart and cmd + option + p + r. i have tried to start it in safe mode but it doesn't work. i have taken the battery out. nothing is working. the past few times i havnt really had a lot on my computer so i just wiped it clean and restored everything. well, now i have things on here that i need so i can't do that. i guess i can wait to get back to my apartment tomorrow and use the disks because i saw somewhere where you can do a "archive and install" so i wont lose anything? but in the meantime...is there anything i can do?

thanks.

You could try holding down the "S" key to boot into single user. Sometimes that will work when a normal boot won't.

yeah, i can bring up single user mode but it wont let me enter in anything. it scrolls a bunch of jiberish then freezes, scrolls more jiberish and freezes again...then it just restarts itself and goes back to the grey screen. since i made my first post 30 minutes ago, it left the grey screen now its at a blue screen thats blinking with the wheel at the bottom that disappears every 5 seconds then pops back up.

i'm starting to go crazy with this!

Try downloading the combo updater here and running that - some times it will help sort the OS

Collin Bl said:

Try downloading the combo updater here and running that - some times it will help sort the OS

Click to expand...

i can't get past the grey screen how am i suppose to download anything?

I suspect a hard drive problem. Have Apple take a look at it.

First off see if zapping the pram by holding down command, option, p and r keys together immediately after the chimes and keep held down until third set of chimes sound. If this does ot work, HDD problems as George suggests.

My friend is having the same problem, few days ago too, hadn't rebooted for a bit, she doesn't recall agreeing to update, but i suspect it. it happened after a hard hang and forced boot. intelmac ms messenger 7 had just been installed by a visiting relative.

have done all the suggestions on many forums... ie special keys to reset, etc

disk utility from install dvd found repairable errors

single user lets me fsck

target boot lets me see the drive from another machine.. question is, what to fix?

nothing changed how it boots to gray and then spins.

does an os re-install require drive backup and wipe?

Tell her to keep relatives and other well meaning windows users away from her Mac. Did Repair Disk when booted from the system install disc repair everything, or just say there were errors? Sounds like you might be up for a format of the drive and a clean install and yes that deletes everything on the drive.

problem now solved,

prior to giving up and wiping, i repeated some of the tasks, did the 3 chime command+option+p+r again, then booted successfully. I'm not sure if the different resets and battery removal i did had to occur in a certain sequence, basically i did it all twice at least.

when it had finally booted properly, colours were VERY contrasty, turned out some settings in system preferences were changed... colours was under universal access "Enhance Contrast" and also keyboard fn key option was changed (under keyboard and mouse) so that brightness, sound keys, etc would only work IF holding FN key.

installed applejack (check compatibility with your OS version!), ran it from single user mode (command+s), some errors and permissions were noted and fixed.

I found out that the Messenger7 was run from the install .dmg by the Mac noob rather than copied to applications and crash occured when adding a new user to the chat profile.. coincidence or circumstance? It now seems to work when installed properly.

All seems well now, thank you.

Circumstances for sure doing that from the .dmg file. Pleased it worked out.