Thursday 20 September 2012

Resolving Gray Screen error in Mac OS X

Gray Screen error can occur during the startup of Mac and it is a common occuring problem in Mac OS X. Gray Screen can show up just after you started or restarted the Mac. When Mac is in the process of startup, a blue screen occurs but sometimes it may change to the Gray Screen and system hangs. On the Gray Screen you can see the Apple logo, spinning gear, spinning globe. Mac gets stuck at this screen, you will not hear any hard drive sound or fan sound, it will be like everything just stopped.

How Gray Screen of Death might occur on OS X?

Peripheral issue can cause the Gray Screen of error i.e. whenever a defected or bad peripheral gets connected to Mac, it will prevent your Mac to startup. Mac may also gets stuck becuase of a non-responvsive peripheral. One of the most common form of this condition is when a bad peripheral causes the signalling pins on Mac's port to stuck in one condition and these can cause the Mac to freeze and failes to boot properly.

Steps to solve the Gray Screen error:
  1. Disconnect all the external peripherals connected to the Mac .
  2. Now, forcefully turn Mac off by pressing the power button and then start again.
  3. Start the Mac backup and if backup starts normally then it is sure that the problem is with the peripherals only.
  4. Now turn off Mac and start checking the peripherals one by one. If the Mac shows the error while attaching to a particular external peripheral then it will be the defected peripheral causing the issue.
So by this, you can find the bad peripheral if any. In case you find a bad peripheral, it is advisable to first change the cable of the peripheral but if the problem still prvails then change the peripheral.

If peripherals are working fine then possible solutions for this error:
  1. Try to start Mac in safe mode.
  2. Reset the NVRAM / PRAM.
  3. Remove any third party RAM Or internal hardware from Mac.
  4. Try using disk utility.
If above solutions fails and in middle of all this you have lost your important data then it is highly recommended to use a recovery tool to get every piece of lost files back on Mac.