2011 Macbook pro wont complete bootup. Is hardrive dead?

Hi Ogelthorpe, thanks for your quick reply.

Shift+Command+V does exist, details are here: Mac OS X: Gray screen appears during startup - Apple Support

To quote the article: "Start your Mac, then immediately hold the Shift key. This performs a Safe Boot. Advanced tip: If you want to see the status of a Safe Boot as it progresses, you can hold Shift-Command-V during start up (instead of just Shift). "

This is what produced the image in my first post. The image shows the last thing on screen before it goes to grey screen again.

If I do a regular safe boot, it grey screens also

UPDATE - I am able to boot into Single-User Mode, but I know so little about linux. Could anyone suggest some diagnostic ideas?

Also, i attempted to boot from an OSX Lion disk that I have, but that also went to grey screen after quite a long time of the apple logo and spinning/loading icon.... if my hard drive was dead, I wouldn't have thought it would effect trying to boot from CD?? perhaps its something else?

Safe Boot attempts to load and then grey screens when the loading bar is about half way.

You are right that my Lion is a home made boot disc, however I am starting to suspect this is not a hard drive issue.

I was able to boot into single user mode and try "/sbin/mount/ -fy" which ran a check on the hard drive and says "The volume Macintosh HD appears to be OK"

Still unable to boot regularly/bootcamp/recovery/safemode ooooor from CD

Really stuck for ideas 😟

After trying "/sbin/fsck/ -fy" about 10 times out of frustration in the single user mode (earlier I called this "sbin/mount/ -fy" which was wrong btw) and then trying a bunch more safe boots, The recovery drive decided to work!!??! So I used Disk Utility and attempted to Repair the drive, which said there was nothing wrong with it. Then I attempted to boot normally a couple more times and now one of them has randomly worked?! So my laptop is now working and I'm letting it backup time machine now (my last one was only a few days ago anyway luckily). I had an error report about a graphical problem on the last boot, so I'll look into it further and report back if I find the cause. I'm a little worried this isn't the end of the problem

Thanks Ogelthorpe for your prompt responses. If it hadn't fixed today, I would have been asking my friend for his HDD enclosure ;P

Hi Alberto. This is really helpful thanks, it sounds more like what I was starting to expect would be the issue, since I was unable to boot either the Recovery drive or from disk. It seemed to be working ok last night but I'll see what further diagnostics I can do on it tonight with some of the things mentioned in the thread you linked, like gfxCardStatus.

LATEST UPDATE: So it seemed to be periodically working and my 3 year warranty has been out for a little while now so I was kind of happy with that, but then it finally died and never got past the grey screen again, so I reluctantly took it to an apple store to see how big the repair bill would be.

The 'genius' ran some pretty cool diagnostics (which the geek within me enjoyed) and agreed with what we'd eventually concluded here, that the graphics card had died. He then confirmed that my warranty was way out of date, but then instead of quoting me a huge repair bill, tapped away at his iPad for a few minutes and said that since I'd bough the Macbook direct from Apple and from the UK online store, he could put it through for free repair based on UK Consumer Law?!?!?! FANTASMICAL NEWS!!!!!

So its currently being repaired completely free, saving me at least £400 already, as well as a small list of other potential fixes we then discussed... since it was free 😉

I have since looked quite a long way into these consumer laws. In short, it guarantees you to get some decent mileage out of a product that would be expected to last a long time (up to 6 years).

In the real world, this will usually translate into having an argument with a bloke from Currys about your dishwasher that broke after 2 years and him saying you only had a years warranty. They tend to deny knowledge of these laws in the hope that you'll give up and go away, and you might need threaten to go through the small claims court before they actually sort it out for you. Alternatively, at Apple they seem to treat it like a free 6 year warranty for everyone (2 years for iPhones/iPads) and will tell you about it even if you didn't know

tl;dr Apple customer service is awesome and saved me big monies