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Grey Screen and Can't restore from disc

A

Art671

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Jul 12, 2012
4
0
hi,

I'm having a lot of problems with my Mac Pro which is running on Snow Leopard.
Whenever I turn it on (not holding any buttons) a blue screen appears, and then it goes to a grey screen which it gets stuck on. Sometimes two cursors, or a cursor and the spinning beach ball appear when it is stuck on the grey screen.
It can startup on a safe boot, but i've recently started getting kernel panics. I was able to get rid of these by resetting the PRAM.
I've have tried to erase and restore the computer on the original disc that came with the computer (Tiger), but when I attempted to restart from the disc using the C button, I get a no permitted sign/no entry sign.

Does anyone have any ideas how i can fix/wipe the computer, so that i can start from scratch?

Thanks :)
 
Art671 said:
Hi, I've tried that, but i can't do the 'Perform an Erase and Install installation of Mac OS X' part, as the no entry sign appears, when starting up from the disc.
Thanks for the fast reply :)
Click to expand...
As it says in the first link:
If the issue persists after you follow the above steps, you may wish to make an appointment with a Mac Genius at an Apple store, contact AppleCare via phone, or contact an Apple Authorized Service Provider for assistance.
Click to expand...
 
As someone who works at AppleCare these are the options you have going off the information you've provided.

If you have a compatible computer with Lion installed then you can attempt to erase and install via Internet recovery which can be forced by holding cmd+shift+r on startup.

If that doesn't work than you can install snow leopard or lion to am external disk (torrent lion to usb if you already own it and then activate it with apple id). Once once the external you can manually backup your stuff.

If both above don't work then you have a faulty hdd and if you don't have warrant buy one and install it yourself or book a genius appointment if you are covered.

Hope that helps.
 
The prohibitory sign you are getting when trying to boot to disc suggests you are using the wrong disc. Is it a gray install disc, is it for that particular computer, or is it a retail copy? If its the original Mac Pro from 2006 the disc should be for 10.4.7 or later, maybe even 10.5. If it is an earlier disc, you will be unable to startup to it. Do you happen to have the 10.6 disc you upgraded with? If so you can follow the first article GGJstudios posted and run Disk Utility to try finding out it the hard drive is a loss or salvageable, or just needs a reinstall.
 
Thanks for your replies.
I've tried a number of these methods. I can't boot from the original installation disc (tiger), or the snow leopard disc, or the leopard disc. When you hold the C button down, the system either has a kernel panic or a grey screen.
I've tried to install from my imac. The imac can see the mac pro's files etc, but the mac pro is unable to connect to the imac.
I put a new hard disk in the mac pro, and reformatted it. But when either i startup, in safe mode, normal mode, or from a disc, it gives me a kernel panic.

All i want to do is erase everything from the computer (don't care about losing all my information, it is all on my imac.)

A couple of days ago, some how i got the mac pro working, for about an hour, which it then froze, and went back to the state that i've described.

I don't live any where near an apple store, so going to an apple genius is kind of out of the question.

I've done a hardware holding the D button on startup, that was said there was no hardware problems. I've used disk utility, and that is claiming that there is no problems with the computer.

Thanks again for your help. I hope the extra information i've given means something to someone, and that they could help me.
 
Art did you ever solve this problem? I am experiencing the same thing... Dual cursors, and spinning wheel
 
I can also start up in safe mode ONLY, including from the install DVD.
 
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