Blue Screen Freeze on Start Up for Mac Pro

- Once booted in Recovery Mode, open Terminal, and run the following command: csrutil disable

- Reboot the system.

- Once the system reboots, it should now successfully boot into your install of OS X. Now, you'll need to download the program found here.

- Run the program, follow the prompts, and enter your password when prompted.

- Once the tool finishes running, your system should now run without the dedicated graphics, and should work completely normally.

the program's name is:

MacBook Pro dGPU disabler.app

... probably still in the downloads folder. Re-running it is not required, just a matter of interest.

It is not signed by a Registered Developer. You need to approve it individually, using one of the two procedures described in this article. The first procedure is laid out in the numbered steps to take. The second (sort of a shortcut) is summarized in the Note at the end:

https://support.apple.com/kb/ph25088?locale=en_US

You have 30 minutes or less (after attempting to open) to approve such an App before the option disappears.

Normally, we would recommend you stay far away from apps not from Registered Developers. But these are desperate times for you, and you have the assurance of Readers here that this software is benign.

Because of their other work in allowing MacOS to run on nominally-unsupported Macs, I speculate that developer may have trouble getting a Developer Certificate. Apple does not want to encourage unauthorized work-arounds, because they might ensnare novice users who then mess up their systems.

Short Stick wrote:

The blue screen is what appears after an option hold restart and selecting/launching the instal macOS High Sierra as you can see in the photo.

In that case, the DVD you have created is damaged or defective. Users report MUCH better results with USB-stick Installers, and they are Hugely faster at installing. Dual-Layer DVDs are really slow at Installing MacOS, and since they are not really random-access, this is slowness is compounded.

Short Sick wrote:

If I use the same option hold and select to launch the the HD itself next comes the apple logo is gray and has a strange progress bar with a couple places it's not defined well or has some overlapping lines. After partial progress the screen switches to an all white screen then turns a little gray before repeating self restarting till it simply freezes on the grayish color screen.

The initial "chime" sound is generated in software when your Mac passes the Power-On Self Test. If it occurs and/or startup continues, your Mac is working.

The solid Apple is not in the Mac's ROM at Cold start. The Apple logo can only appear when it is fetched in the first "blob" of software loaded from a 'magic' place on the boot drive, or re-run after a Restart. Then a whole lot of stuff is initialized, and the progress Bar moves part way across. After a cold start, seeing the solid Apple appear says your drive is not completely dead.

The next step requires a lot of files by name, so the File System is initialized, and the Boot Drive is Mounted. If the drive directory is damaged, the drive can not be Mounted, so your Mac begins one pass of Disk Utility Repair. This will take an additional about five minutes. During this process, the progress bar may be extended, and will grow by an additional amount not seen on a routine startup.

at the end of that process (which should not take more than about five minutes), it will attempt to Mount the drive again:

-- if the drive Mounts, boot-up continues.

-- if the drive cannot be Mounted, your Mac can do nothing more, so it powers off.

-- if the process stalls, this may indicate you have Bad Blocks on your Boot drive. The re-reading of Bad blocks can take a very long time (on the order of a quarter minute for each Bad Block).

then goes to the blue screen

The blue screen is not useful in determining ANYTHING.

Blue screen is not a standard MacOS screen. I wrote in detail about what screens you see when starting up and what it means. The sequence of events is crucial to understanding where it went wrong.

Do you get the solid Apple?

do you get the "regular" progress bar?

does the progress bar get extended?

does the Mac shut off?

what model MacBook Pro is this, by year, early mid late, and processor speed and screen size?

The MacBook Pro 15-in 2011 has Dual Graphics. In some units, the Discrete graphics processor can fail, but the processor does not notice. This can give it the appearance of not booting, and it may produce weird visual effects (? maybe that could include your unusual deep blue screen or unusual wonky progress bar?).

Do you use an external display? Do you edit videos?

If you do neither, there is a collection of work-arounds that disable the Discrete graphics processor, leaving the slightly less capable Integrated graphics processor handling the entire workload. This is not even noticeable for ordinary uses. These work-arounds are all software, and if they do not solve the problem are all reversible.

If you would like to pursue some of those, just post back and I can look up my list of work-arounds and post it.

Please read the entire posting before you implement anything. This is a disjointed collection of work-arounds, not one huge procedure. The last one on the list is the easiest to implement.

Install gfxCardStatus (https://gfx.io) and set it to "i" (integrated graphics only). It will allow your MBP to run on integrated graphics only, bypassing the discrete GPU which has the issues. This may allow your MBP to run normally, although it will have reduced graphics performance when permforming demanding graphics tasks. The alternative is replacing the logic board, which is not cost effective on a machine that old, unless gfx does not resolve the issue and you really want to keep this MBP.

There is an acknowledged bug in the current version of Cody Kreiger's Open-Source gfxcardstatus, and the developer has confessed he does not have time to fix it right now.

There is a fork off the main build by steveschow available that seems to fix that problem for current versions of MacOS such as ElCapitan and Sierra. He provides a finished .app for direct download -- you do not have to compile anything.

https://github.com/steveschow/gfxCardStatus/releases

Also note that if your Mac does not run long enough to allow gfxcardstatus to be added, this is not really practical.

In addition, Steve Schow writes that he has abandoned further development -- because there are better solutions available [for both the 2010 model and 2011 models]. 

2010 model:

I have discontinued use of gfxCardStatus to solve the MBP kernel panic problem as the issue is better solved on 2010 models with the nVidia GPU by the following hack:

https://github.com/julian-poidevin/MBPMid2010_GPUFix.

2011 model:

the use of ArchLinux bootable CD to gain access to and re-write the EFI on the drive, and permanently disable the discrete graphics chip. This page and scroll down past the list to the blog:

http://github.com/steveschow/gfxCardStatus

There are two similar procedure listed. I used the second from MacRumors as it seemed easier. I have made the Arch Linux bootable CD on another Mac, and tried this approach.  I now have a perfectly-functioning MacBook Pro late 2011 15-in model with Discrete Graphics disabled. Runs just fine. But NO external display support any more.

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There is a completely different work-around developed more recently. It requires only single-User mode to get started, then type a complicated string into NVRAM, then disable System Integrity Protection and run an additional little program (direct-download link provided there) to make the change semi-permanent.

http://dosdude1.com/gpudisable/

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- Immediately after running the reboot command, hold down Command + R (if you're running OS X 10.11 or later) to boot into Recovery Mode. If you don't have a Recovery Partition, you can boot from a Mac OS installer USB drive.

- Once booted in Recovery Mode, open Terminal, and run the following command: 

csrutil disable


NB>> This command is ONLY available in Recovery mode or an Installer disk or USB-stick

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I would attribute your trouble to a one-off problem, possibly related to loading previously-cached kernel extensions. If it happens again, I suggest you make a pass through Safe Mode. As a side effect, Safe Mode forces a re-build of the cached Kernel extensions, which would ensure the extensions for the Discrete graphics process or are not included.

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After some time, I tried to re-run the Utility on the computer where is is installed, just to be sure all was staying OK.

I was surprised to find that the Utility reported It could not do anything for me because I "did not have a Discrete GPU".

From this I read that 'the work-around was so complete in removing all traces of the Discrete GPU, it could no longer be detected through MacOS'. So the Utility had nothing to act upon. All was well.