Weird gray screen/freeze boot issue with 2008 Macbook Pro

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16 points

Weird gray screen/freeze boot issue with 2008 Macbook Pro

Early 2008 MBP. Gray boot screen with apple logo and spinning gear freezes. Now for the odd part. In the background I can hear iChat log in, and I can see the associated account as available via Bonjour so I know that behidn the scenes, the laptop is indeed logging in and launching the desktop. I also managed to remote in and can see the desktop normally. The screen remains frozen.

I was able to initially get it working by resetting PRAM and NVRAM but that is no longer working either. Also tried an SMC reset.

Can't boot from CD or recovery partition (same result..gray Apple Logo boot screen freeze).

Booting it in target disc mode allows full access to the HD without issue. HD was checked (no issues) as well as permissions the one time I did get a desktop.

Any ideas?

MacBook Pro, Mac OS X (10.7.3)

Posted on Feb 8, 2012 6:25 AM

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Answer 1

DJ.Rumpy Author

Level 1

16 points

Feb 8, 2012 7:15 PM in response to DJ.Rumpy

Was able to pull this info from the kernel log.

Feb 8 21:02:38 Username kernel[0]: NVDA: rmStart failed

Feb 8 21:02:38 Username kernel[0]: NVDA,Display-B: Not usable

Any suggestions? It appears that the video is not initializing properly. Not sure at this point if it's a hardware failure or not. I tried reinstalling when I managed to get to recovery console, but that doesn't seem to have helped either. That only overlayed the files on the partition though. Perhaps I should just try a complete reformat?

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Answer 2

DJ.Rumpy Author

Level 1

16 points

Feb 8, 2012 7:52 PM in response to DJ.Rumpy

May have found the cause. A search for teh above error landed me on an Apple knowledge base article about a faulty nVidia video card that falls in the same date range as my Macbook Pro.

http://support.apple.com/kb/ts2377

I've made an appointment with a genious and will post what I find out. According to the KB, if the failure happens within 4 years fo the purchase date, Apple will cover the cost of the repair.

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