Because of the Grey Screen of Death, I was so close to throwing in the towel and just replacing my hard drive. The files that I had yet to back up were headed to the trash. This morning I woke and decided to give it one more try.
My computer has been stuck on the grey screen of death for about a month and I had no idea how I’d fixed it. Everything I found online either didn’t help or referred some expensive options or simply advised to just wipe the slate clean….get a new hard drive. I received the same advice from the “experts.”
Being a taurus, I was too stubborn to settle for defeat. Lucky me!
Mac Grey Screen of Death
Here is what I did to solve the grey screen of death on my mac book pro:
First I booted in Verbose mode:
Power on computer. As soon as you hear the tone hold down the command key and the V at the same time. A black page will come up and direct to a terminal.
Here I found my error. Words that stuck out:
full disk error
invalid sibling link
repairing B catalog
failed to repair volume
It was now stuck on continuing for a very long time so I just held down the power button to shut off. I pressed power again and this time booted in single user mode by holding command + S
at the prompt I tried to repair by typing: fsck-fy
that did absoloutely nothing….if it did make a difference a message would have said ***File system was modified***, then I wuld have repeated this command until the message said **the volume (name of volume) appears to be ok.
Then I would have typed: reboot to restart my computer.
But that didn’t happen.
so I typed: umount /
Next I went to find all the files and directories that were possibly bogging down my startup disk. I typed:
cd /users/myuserid (you would replace with yours)
du -sk * | sort -n
the “s” option returns a summary of a directory’s contents
“k” option shows the output in 1 kb increments
sort command list them in ascending order with the largest directory last.
continue changing the directory until I isolated the largest directory
cd directory
du -sk * .??* | sort -n | tail
Kept narrowing down until I found the largest and deleted unwanted files and directories.
delete unwanted files:
rm filename
delete unwanted files with spaces or weird characters
rm “filename”
forcebly remove files & contents of directory
rm -f -r filename
remove all files & subcategories
rm -rf directory
remove empty directory
rmdir directory
I repeated until I felt I deleted enough files and directories….mostly videos.
Then I typed Reboot and hit return.
Booted in verbose mode (Command + V)
Took a while but the disk tried to repair itself….went past the errors that occured in the past ( This is where I started to get excited)
after about 5 minutes of it trying to repair itself I got a repair was successful message and the computer rebooted itself without prompting from me.
I am very happy to have my mac back! 
