Grey screen + cursor frozen + harddisk working according to disk utility

Question

Level 1

12 points

Grey screen + cursor frozen + harddisk working according to disk utility

1. Background info
Since I upgraded to Yosemite my iMac seemed rather slow.
Today I wanted to clean it up a little. I did a couple of things that might have cause my current problem:
I changed the permission settings when I discovered that everybody had the right to read and write on my harddisk

Further I tried to upgrade the driver for my Wacom Intous Tablet and made some changes to the login item configuration. (1 unchecked a webbrowser - thats all)

Suddenly my Mac became really slow, almost as if it crashed. In the past 4 years my iMac had never crashed, but I quickly lost my passion and manually restarted by holding down the power button, leading to my current situation:

2. Current situation:
When I restart my iMac it simply wont boot. Everything seems normal, until the loading bar stops at around 30%, The next thing I get is a grey screen with the mouse cursor frozen in the upper left corner. Sometimes it turns into a spinning rainbow loading wheel that never stops spinning.

3. What I tried to fix it

I found a lot of suggestions on how to fix the issue, but nothing worked.
I tried:
-Sisconecting all cables / connected devices and whatsoever
-Safe boot

-Resetting the NVRAM / PRAM

-Disconnecting the power source

-I tried to reinstall OS X Yosemite from the recovery system, but I could not complete the setup due to some errors. (I have a report saved that I could upload if this would help)

-I analysed the disc in the disc utility but everything seemed OK. Also the repair worked fine.

-However I cant repair the permissions in the disc utility (this was suggested by several people) The option is simply greyed out.

4. Important info and questions

I can still access my Windows via Boot Camp. It seems that all hardware is still working. However I can not access my Mac partition from boot camp. Is there a way to do so, so I can rescue my data?

In the recovery system I managed to take a look at my data (via the safari web help) Everything is still there, so I am quite sure that this is something software related...?

System specs

Mid 2011 27" iMac
Intel Core i7-2600 CPU at 3.40GHz
16GB RAM
AMD Radeon HD 6970M
I am running the latest version of Yosemite

Edit:
I am more than gratefull for any input!

iMac, Mac OS X (10.7.5), null

Posted on Mar 30, 2015 2:41 PM

Reply

Answer 1

Mar 30, 2015 4:53 PM in response to dmickeleit

I analysed the disc in the disc utility

-However I cant repair the permissions in the disc utility (this was suggested by several people) The option is simply greyed out.

If you did the above from your Finder desktop, please try the following:

Run OS Recovery

Disconnect all devices from your computer except for the keyboard & mouse.

Boot up from your computer by holding down the command+r keys. This will take you to the recovery drive.

Select Disk Utility & hit Return.

In Disk Utility select the HD on the left & click on Repair Disk (bottom right).

When you reach the desktop after doing the above, again repair permissions & restart your computer.

I am running the latest version of Yosemite

Not according to your system profile: Mac OS X (10.7.5)

Conflicting info: Please update/correct your profile so that you can receive the correct troubleshooting suggestions. This will assist the users in trying to help you. Thank you.

============

Thank you for reporting the troubleshooting efforts you have previously tried. Very helpful to users trying to help.

Reply