My nephews 2009 MacBook Pro (15") is only booting up to the gray screen with the Apple logo on it. The cursor is the spinning wheel, not the colored beachball one.

Looks like this:



Running Snow Leopard with unknown amount of ram or HD. Probably stock.

He's 2 hours way and might be coming up this afternoon so we can diagnose and hopefully fix it. first thing I'm going to do is try to do firewire target disk mode..I'm assuming you can still do that?

As long as you both have FW ports.. I believe so.

I googled it, possible that it may be ram related.

I doubt it's RAM related, with bad RAM you get panics or lock up usually, but it is a serious problem anyway. Seems more corrupt HD and/or file system.

See if you can start in Verbose mode. Hold down Command-V till you see the dos looking screen. If it makes it there where does it stop loading? If it never makes it there chances are you will just need to do a re-install if a disk check gives the all clear, which will still keep his data intact.

Of course do the usual suspects first once you get it into Target Disk Mode. Disk Warrior or Tech Tool Pro if you have it, or at least see what Disk Utility will do.

If DW or DU can't fix it you would need to make sure it's backed up, then wipe and reinstall.

I was looking here:

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/963645?start=0&tstart=0

The machines in that thread didn't even make it to the Apple and spinning gear thingy though, the screen stays black.

Have you tried a safe boot? Also, zapping the PRAM sometimes works wonders =)

I'm sure you've tried both, but just wanted to check-off the "Do you have the machine plugged-in, m'am?" boxes ;-)

Any luck yet?

This is my nephew we are talking about. I saw him this past weekend and the laptop was back at the dorm, so obviously not a top priority