Stuck booting to gray screen with spinning disk inside

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Level 1

15 points

Stuck booting to gray screen with spinning disk inside

A bit thank you to all of your who take the time to answer.

I have a 2009, Mac Mini with 10.6.7 installed. It has a 100GB BootCamp partition set up with Windows XP SP2 installed from a Retail Disk. Everything has been working fine until recently I it is now booting to the gray screen. Turning off & restarting usually gets rid of the issue, but now I am permanently stuck booting to the gray screen (No logo or spinning gear.) After a couple of minutes, the screen goes black & I am forced to turn off the unit. The issue is that I have a Windows bootable CD inside the drive which seems to spin up & then nothing happens. I am unable to eject this disk at this time. I have x3 other 2009 Mac Minis with similar configurations (Win XP, Win Vista, Win 7) & this is slowly occurring more frequently on each.

Just to be clear, I am stuck b/c there is a windows bootable CD in the drive which I am unable to get out to pursue using Mac or Windows Install disks to check/repair anything.

I have attempted the following:

1. "Command +Option+P+R" does not respond.

2. Holding either/both "Option" buttons does work.

3. Pressing eject button does nothing.

4. Left is unplugged for a while & attempted again.

Mac mini, Mac OS X (10.6.7)

Posted on May 25, 2011 8:43 AM

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Answer 1

Best reply

dalstott

Level 4

2,639 points

May 25, 2011 10:07 AM in response to nestor a.

Check these urls out.

http://www.ehow.com/how_4596497_eject-cd-manually-mac-mini.html

http://hintsforums.macworld.com/archive/index.php/t-76906.html

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Answer 2

nestor a. Author

Level 1

15 points

May 25, 2011 11:30 AM in response to nestor a.

Dalstott,

URL: http://www.ehow.com/how_4596497_eject-cd-manually-mac-mini.html is excellent. My last resort would have been to take it apart.

However, none of those resolved the issue. After coming back from lunch, I turned it on just to see & it booted into Windows XP... *sigh* I have ejected the disk normally & will run some tests. Thanks again for the response as it provided me with excellent trouble-shooting tips if something like this ever happens again.

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Answer 3

May 25, 2011 7:42 PM in response to nestor a.

Might I suggest that while your system is running, you might want to consider downloading and installing AppleJack? It is a feww tool that can run through sme automated tasks to help repair some issues like minor versions of what you seem to be experiencing. The problem is that if you don't install it before you need it, you won't have it when you need it. 🙂

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Answer 4

dalstott

Level 4

2,639 points

May 26, 2011 10:12 AM in response to GeekBoy.from.Illinois

Good advice GeekBoy.

I have AppleJack on all my machines that can use it. I run it whenever a machine acts oddly and have cleared up many problems.

ttp://sourceforge.net/projects/applejack/

There is a similar utility as a part of TinkerTool SystemRelease 2 called Emergency Tool which is accessed upon startup by also holding the cmd + s keys. It does a lot of things as you can see below.

http://www.bresink.com/osx/300321023/details.html

TinkerTool System 2 comes with an additional emergency tool which can help you to troubleshoot Mac OS X problems even if the graphical user interface is no longer starting, or the user account of the system administrator has been damaged. This standalone version of TinkerTool System 2 includes the following features:

Verifying and repairing the startup disk before startup.
Verifying and repairing the system's folder for the storage of temporary objects.
Verifying and repairing specific permission settings of the code integrity checker of Mac OS X.
Verifying and resetting permission settings of operating system files, independent of the graphical user interface.
Performing an automatic quick check and repair procedure to ensure a sufficiently good state of the base operating system.
Deactivating corrupted preference files for a user account.
Deleting user-related Input Managers.
Deactivating and reactivating cache contents of a user account.
Deactivating and reactivating all preference settings of a user account.
Deactivating corrupted system preference files.
Deleting system-wide Input Managers.
Deactivating and reactivating the contents of system-wide caches.
Resetting network-managed preferences (MCX).
Removing third-party startup objects.
Cleaning the swap space.
Disabling automatic login.
Uninstalling the emergency tool, independent of the graphical user interface.

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