Booting recovery at grey screen
How do you boot into recovery on a solid grey screen? Unit is 2011 MacBook pro
MacBook Pro (2020 and later)
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It seems you are at least seeing some sort of video on the screen at some point.
Try running the Apple Diagnostics to see if any hardware issues are detected. Unfortunately the diagnostics don't detect all hardware failures. One very likely source of failure for a laptop of this age is a bad hard drive. However, you should usually be able to boot into Internet Recovery Mode, or from a bootable macOS USB installer. Whether you can actually do anything else beyond getting to the installer options is another matter and may provide more clues.
See if booting into Safe Mode works.
Do you have the 13" or a 15" or 17" model? The 15" and 17" models are known to have GPU issues which can do this even when booting into Internet Recovery Mode or from a bootable USB installer (or a full macOS external boot drive). If you still only get just a gray screen when attempting to boot from external media using these methods, then a GPU issue is a likely possibility.
Booting into local Recovery Mode using just Command + R is not a good way for diagnosing issues if the OS on the drive has an issue, or if you have a worn out or failing drive since it will affect both the main OS and the local recovery mode boot files since they are located on the drive as well.
It never hurts to try an SMC Reset or a PRAM Reset (hold the PRAM Reset for at least three chimes).
Also when attempting to boot normally you can try booting with Verbose Mode (Command + V) which will scroll the startup system log entries on the screen. They will fly by quickly, but sometimes if the system gets stuck you can take a picture of the last entries which sometimes may contain a clue. If, however, this scrolling of text disappears back to a gray screen, then in my experience the two most likely causes are a bad hard drive (or OS), or a bad GPU.
