Q: hey I just upgraded my MacBook Pro 2011 to mavericks and it crashed and anytime I switch it on it shows a gray screen with a spinn ... more
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Jan 25, 2014 8:40 AMby Melophage,HelpfulVaawn,
if your MacBook Pro is an Early 2011 model, then I highly recommend that you purchase a replacement pair of its grey installation DVDs from either Apple or iFixit. If your MacBook Pro is a Late 2011 model, then it never came with installation DVDs — it came with a recovery partition on its internal disk.
Since you currently have Mavericks installed, you can hold down a Command key and the R key as it starts up to boot into Recovery mode. Once the Mac OS X Utilities menu appears, select Disk Utility. On the left-hand side of the Disk Utility window it will show your disks and partitions; select the boot partition on your internal disk (typically called “Macintosh HD”). On the right-hand side of the window, press the Verify Disk button if it’s not greyed out; if it is greyed out, or if it reports that it found errors, press the Repair Disk button. Once the verification/repair is completed, exit Disk Utility and select Restart from the Apple menu to restart your MacBook Pro in normal mode. Does it still show the grey screen with the “beach ball of death”?
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Jan 27, 2014 5:55 PMby Melophage,Vaawn,
your possible options that exclude erasing the internal disk are limited — that’s why the best time to make a backup, to guard against the possibiility of losing your files to problems such as this, is when your MacBook Pro is behaving normally.
- If you have a bootable external disk, you could boot from it and try copying your files from the internal disk to the external disk. If you don’t have a bootable external disk, you could buy an external disk, format it using Disk Utility, and install Mavericks onto it from another Mac.
- If you have a FireWire 800 cable and access to another Mac with a FireWire 800 port, you could boot your MacBook Pro in Target Disk mode to have it act like an external disk to the other Mac, and then try copying your files from your MacBook Pro to the other Mac.
I’m not sure if other options would be available to you.
