My friend asked me to check out her macbook (2.1 GHz 1 GB Ram 120 HDD) because it wouldn't boot up. only showed a solid grey screen with no apple logo or chime. i tried everything from going into safe mode, target disk mode, reseting p ram, inserting leopard dvd, holding c key, holding option key, ect. nothing but a grey screen. so i took out the hard drive and put it in a external case and re installed the ram (incase they were loose). i connected it to my macbook pro and os x gave me this error message, "Disk Insertion. the disk you inserted is not readable by this computer. is something wrong with the HDD or the software like leopard. then i opened disk utility on my mbp and did a disk repair. i got many red error messages so i just aborted the repair. so i took it out of the case and put it back in the macbook. it still shows a grey screen. but target disk mode now works but my mbp still gives me the disk insertion error. so then i tried the leopard dvd. i held down option and it showed up. now it booted from the leopard disk. but the installer doesnt show the hard drive. is the hard drive screwed?
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MacBook Won't Boot. Grey Screen
- Thread starter msizzle64
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Cave Man
macrumors 604
First thing you ought to do is boot from the installer DVD and run Disk Utility's Repair option. It might be a simple fix. If not, the drive's filesystem may have been corrupted, requiring a reinstallation of the OS. If you have Disk Warrior (hopefully it's Leopard-compliant by now) you might give it a try, too. Of course, if there's a back-up of the volume, you could just use it for the reinstall.