When booting up, my macbook pro chimes, shows the white/grey screen for a couple seconds, then everything goes blank and it doesn't boot up. any idea what that means?

You can try a system reinstall:

Reinstalling Lion Without Erasing the Drive

Boot to the Recovery HD: Restart the computer and after the chime press and hold down the COMMAND and R keys until the menu screen appears. Alternatively, restart the computer and after the chime press and hold down the OPTION key until the boot manager screen appears. Select the Recovery HD and click on the downward pointing arrow button.

Repair the Hard Drive and Permissions: Upon startup select Disk Utility from the main menu. Repair the Hard Drive and Permissions as follows.

When the recovery menu appears select Disk Utility. After DU loads select your hard drive entry (mfgr.'s ID and drive size) from the the left side list. In the DU status area you will see an entry for the S.M.A.R.T. status of the hard drive. If it does not say "Verified" then the hard drive is failing or failed. (SMART status is not reported on external Firewire or USB drives.) If the drive is "Verified" then select your OS X volume from the list on the left (sub-entry below the drive entry,) click on the First Aid tab, then click on the Repair Disk button. If DU reports any errors that have been fixed, then re-run Repair Disk until no errors are reported. If no errors are reported click on the Repair Permissions button. Wait until the operation completes, then quit DU and return to the main menu.

Reinstall Lion: Select Reinstall Lion and click on the Continue button.

Note: You can also re-download the Lion installer by opening the App Store application. Hold down the OPTION key and click on the Purchases icon in the toolbar. You should now see an active Install button to the right of your Lion purchase entry. There are situations in which this will not work. For example, if you are already booted into the Lion you originally purchased with your Apple ID or if an instance of the Lion installer is located anywhere on your computer.

Are you saying you cannot do this:

• Restart the computer.
• Immediately upon hearing the chime press and hold down the COMMAND-R keys until the computer starts up to the Recovery HD.

If you can reset the PRAM and SMC, then you can do the above.

Intel-based Mac Power On Self Test RAM error beeps should provide info on any blinking light alerts.

Take it in for repair, then.

Experiencing a very similar problem, any solution found?

Seems no-one ever had an answer for this eh?

I have the same problem, Macbook Pro was working fine, shut it down, a couple of days later tried to turn it on, the white/grey screen comes up, it chimes, then before the Apple logo appears and the spinner starts to indicate the OS is booting, instead the white/grey screen fades to black.

Upon further investigation, it seems like its booted up but the LCD has powered off.

If I press the power button after it has booted, I can hear HDD activity whilst it goes into sleep mode.

Once its gone into sleep mode, I can't wake it however, subsequent press of the power button makes the led on the front illuminate as if its coming out of sleep mode but a few seconds later if starts snoring again.

If I didn't know any better, I would say the back light on the LCD had gone, but it hasn't. If I force power it off and then power it back on again, I can get the breif illumination of the white/grey screen before the same thing happens.

This is my situation exactly, I think. My 2012 13" MacBook Pro machine chimes upon pressing the power button, the screen goes to gray-white you'd normally see upon boot, then after a second or less fades to black before the spinner ever shows up to indicate the OS is booting. Additionally a subsequent press of the power button makes it appear as though the machine is going to wake up, but it doesn't. Power cycling it makes no difference; the same sequence of events occurs. I can't boot into verbose mode, nor can I boot into the recovery partition with Command-R, nor can I pick a partition to boot from by holding down the Option key. Note that unlike the original poster I AM able to do a PRAM reset (Command-Option-P-R), however, it made no discernable difference. I haven't tried an SMC reset yet. Did you ever figure out a solution?

Okay, problem solved. The machine was sitting on top of a stack of other laptops, which was causing it to go asleep immediately. The dumb thing is, I've actually seen this one before and I think it's in an Apple technote.

*moments later*

Yup, here it is:

http://support.apple.com/kb/ts2917

*smacks head*

Genius, i was stucked here for months, thanks

Greetings from Chile.

Glad I could help someone else!! 🙂

Krishen, did you do anything other than unstack the MBP? I have the exact same issue, but now that the MBP is separated from the pile, it's still doing the same thing (going black/to sleep)...thanks in advance for any advice.

Message was edited by: veejnas

No, just unstacked them. What year is your machine? The problem affects 2008+ MacBook Pros, and 2009+ MacBooks (it's pretty likely you're in that range but just making sure).

Haha, just been scratching my head for 15 minutes and found this thread and got to the bit about stacked laptops and sure enough - picked up the top one and the screen came on. Thanks for sharing Krishen.