MacBook Pro start up fails: blue-grey screen

Specs: MacBook Pro 15", Late 2011, Intel i7, 500Gb SSD HD. Problem occurred while running iOS X 10.12 (Sierra) and iOS X 10.13.2 (High Sierra). 10.13 updated yesterday morning and the computer ran fine for the first 24 hours. Fortunately, my data is backed up and not a concern.

This issue: MacBook loads to show the Apple logo and progress bar, the progress bar loads half-way then the screen blinks to blue-grey. Fans are running quietly. Despite many attempts to circumnavigate this problem, the computer always hangs on this screen. When left on the blue-grey screen, sometimes the computer appears unresponsive (there is no cursor) for up to 30 minutes, and sometimes the computer restarts automatically after approximately 2 minutes only to restart again in a continuous loop. Either way, it does not progress to the log in screen.

The first time this happened, I took my computer to a local Apple Repair Authorized company. In their words, "they reinstalled the OS and ran all the updates and then it started fine". And they charged me $100. Ten days later, I have the same problem again. I don't want to spend another $100 to have them run software updates, so I'm posting here first. Help!

Troubleshooting steps I have taken:

1. Cleared PRAM and restart: No change.

2. Reset SMC and restart: No change.

3. Attempted to boot in Safe Mode: Progress bar now loads completely and sits at "fully loaded" for about 2 minutes before blinking to same light blue screen.

4. Booted in verbose mode: rapidly scrolling text for about 10 seconds, then the same light-blue screen. Unable to read anything (...whats the point of verbose mode again?).

5. Booted in Single User Mode: While most of this is above my head, a few things seem odd to me in the log. These include:

nx_kernel_mount:1371: reloading after clean unmount, checkpoint xid 4754, superblock xid 4748

...

disk1s1: device is not readable.

disk1s1: IO failed, error = 13.

hfs_mountroot failed: 13

In Single User Mode the computer loads until :/ root#. both the commands "exit" and "reboot" result in the blue screen.

6. Ran Apple Diagnostics (online): Returned no hardware issues on either the quick or deep scans.

7. Local Apple Authorized Repair company ran more sophisticated Apple Hardware scan: This flagged the video card for a possible problem, but a specific video card test returned no errors.

8. Ran fsck in single user mode: Returned no issues, all checks okay.

9. Booted from USB copy of High Sierra (from which I can successfully boot another MacBook Pro): I can select the drive from the startup manager. When progress bar finishes loading, it blinks to a blue-grey screen and then to a dark grey screen. This appears to match the background when booting from the installation disk/drive, but the window with "Install", "Disk Utility", etc. doesn't show. I'm totally confused.

Miracles!

The computer gods are fickle. I have spent about 10 hours troubleshooting today. While typing this post I left the computer running the "restart loop" and after about 5 restarts, it jumped to the log in screen. I have no idea what changed.

While I'm glad I'm no longer staring at the blue-grey screen, I suspect this problem will occur again and I'd appreciate any diagnostic advice. I think I will do a clean install of 10.13 and manually port over my documents/applications.

MacBook Pro (15-inch Late 2011), macOS High Sierra (10.13.2)

Posted on Jan 8, 2018 8:33 PM

16 replies

May 28, 2018 2:44 AM in response to Wintour

For what it is worth, I updated my Late 2011 15" MBP to High Sierra a few days ago. It worked great until I finally accepted the nagging security update reminder and finally downloaded that update. It did exactly what it is doing on the original asker's computer. I see a grey screen after the loading bar has gone somewhere in the middle and then an endless restart loop. The last time it happened, I had upgraded to High Sierra from Yosemite in-place (no fresh install) and then eventually applied security updates to High Sierra. Next, it happened again on a fresh install of High Sierra, as soon as security updates were applied. This time it also showed me a blue screen at times, and actually booted once or twice only to fail and go back to that blue screen failed state.

The OS on this machine has been always been updated and no fresh OS was installed on it since early 2012 (I think it came with OSX Lion). I had also broken some configuration because of which some things took a long time and I had a lot of things to start suspecting for the issues, software and hardware when it first started acting up and going into grey-screen + restart loop initially.

I initially tried all the diagnostics steps OP describes in their post except the recovery step because my internal keyboard is partially broken and I use an external keyboard which does not get recognised at that stage in the boot sequence. After all that I could do, I suspected my hard drive may have finally given up since the verbose mode showed many i/o failures and such.

I was fortunate to have another hard drive handy, so I formatted and did a fresh install of High Sierra again on this machine. It worked fine for the first few hours until the security update popped up. I thought it would be good to apply this update, but what did I know. The machine started going back into the blue screens and grey screens and restart loops as soon as this security update was applied.

I somehow think the security update (sorry, I didn't note its reference number) broke my old macbook pro (late 2011), again. I will do another fresh install of High Sierra (and not apply security updates this time) and see if that changes anything. Why upgrade to High Sierra at all? Well, I wouldn't do it if Apple and a lot of other applications I need to use weren't troubling and shaming me for using an old system. Some of them even refuse to install on 10.10 including the new version of the behemoth XCode. And if I run an old compatible XCode on this system, all sorts of things including homebrew starts breaking up with me.

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MacBook Pro start up fails: blue-grey screen