MBP 2011 15’’ Grey Screen

Hi,

When I opened my MBP this morning it wouldn’t wake up so I forced it to shutdown by holding the power button. After that it started, went to the grey screen with the Apple logo, loaded the bar, went to the grey screen and suddenly rebooted, over and over again.

Here what I tried:
- Resetting the NVRAM and the SMC seems to do nothing.
- Booting into Internet Recovery, OS X original installation CD, Safe Mode —> All stuck on grey screen for a long time until I reboot. I’m not sure how long it makes sense to wait, I waited for 20-60 minutes for each of them and figured they were stuck. The fans are working until the grey screen where it just seems to be waiting for something.
- Single user mode works to the stage where it asks to enter ‘exit’ to load the system. I wasn’t able to notice any obvious error but there isn’t much time to read. After typing exit it also goes to the grey screen and gets stuck there.

I’m really not sure what to do now. Any idea? Can it be a comeback of the GPU issue? I got it resolved about 18 months ago by Apple and the symptoms are not at all the same (I had a green screen and a crossed circle then).

I was hoping to keep it until WWDC... Hopefully this isn’t too bad.

Thank you!

EDIT: Hardware test revealed nothing but a known false error for my crucial SSD. I’ll still find my old HDD and try to boot from it but I’m doubtful since even internet recovery doesn’t get past the grey screen...

 

Yeah I’m not planning to spend a dollar on it!

Such a workaround would be great for the next 2 months but I have no idea how to do it without booting. I’ll look for those threads on MR and see if I can figure it out.

Thank you!

 

I followed similar instructions earlier and it booted in safe mode

I spent the rest of my day working that way... I was afraid to reboot and not be able to work. I'll do it this weekend when I have more time to play with this.

Thank you all for your replies!

 

I couldn't wait anymore to get out of safe mode so I rebooted and it failed to boot up properly...

Thankfully I burned an ArchLinux CD while I was in safe mode. I booted from it and followed the instructions from the sticky post and it works. The MR community is awesome!