Grey Screen of Annoyance

Hey guys,

I booted up my macbook pro running lion 10.7.2 today and out of nowhere I came across this random issue - the startup screen was stuck on the grey screen that you get before you see the apple logo in the centre.

I forced shutdown and rebooted and this time I hit option and chose the os x lion hard drive and now its back to normal.

I then did a check on disk utility and found that there are absolutely no permission errors as such and the crash reporter folder in the library did not show anything either.

Can anyone please let me know why this might have happened to my machine? I almost had a panic attack. :|

NOTE: I don't have windows installed on this machine. and have not come across any major system errors in recent history. ANd have not bothered installing the Lion recover update that came up recently.

Hope someone can clarify this for me.

Thanks in advance

 

recently run any updates.. or the Firmware updates thats been out?
Occasionally it can cause a boot up or two to be very slow... so it looks like its stuck. Luckily it wasn't doing anything important if you killed it and it still worked.

 

Thanks for the informative reply. THe last update i did was when 10.7.2 was released together with the iphoto update and that was it. Maybe it was a random occurrence or like you mentioned the boot up being randomly slow.

It has not happened again as of yet, so am hoping this won't repeat in the near future. Is there anything else that I should check for (any diagnostic type thing like disk utility)?

 

Yeah I wouldn't worry about it too much. When you're dealing with computers in general a minor glitch will happen from time to time. It could've been a piece of software that didn't quit properly and caused the glitch and OS X may have tried to reload it upon startup. Don't get too alarmed on something especially if it's gone after a hard reset.

 

Just make sure you keep constant back ups ... in case something fails. You can use Disk Utility to verify/repair the disk of course ... (the disk, not just the permissions)

 

THanks for the replies guys and I really appreciate it. I will make sure to continuously backup my machine.

THanks again

Can you please point me to a link which shows you how to actually repair the disk rather than permissions? Im running OS X Lion and am not sure on how to do this.

 

It is all under Disk Utility. I don't remember the exact name of that tab, but try clicking through all of them at the top of the window to see the options that come up.

Alternatively, I think Cmd + R also brings up disk utility at start up to do disk repair.

 

CHeers. thanks for the reply.