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White Screen o' Death?


darcyl
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Tried installing Boot Camp.

Decided that Windows on my Mac isn't all that hot...didn't think it was picking up the partition properly.

Quit my Windows install.

Rebooted.

 

And that's where I'm at. I get a white screen when my 20" IMac starts, and that's it.

Hold Shift down...no safe mode

Put the OS X disc in and hold C down on startup, doesn't boot to the disk.

Hold Option down...nothing.

 

Any thoughts?

 

Thanks,

 

DL

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Hey Taylor,

 

Thanks for the response. I'm on the phone with Mac Support right now and the guy stepped me through that stage. So now when it starts up, I get a chime, but still white screen.

 

I'm on hold as he talks with someone else there for some other options.

 

DL

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K, so after all this we've narrowed down the culprit to a missing firmware required for bootcamp.

 

However...is there no way to access low-level machine (I'm thinking of the BIOS with PC's, where I know it'll just look directly at the optical drive instead of hitting anything else first, which is what I'm guessing is happening...Boot Camp is somehow intercepting the initial requests or something...)

 

DL

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Tried that too. See, the thing is that Windows was never actually installed...I never got past the screen to select NTFS quick or total formatting, because I thought it might be overwriting the Mac partition.

 

So maybe the Windows partition was setup by Bootcamp as the startup, but since there wasn't an actual Windows installation it just hung at the power up...I dunno. I brought it into the shop either way, so I'll let you guys know what ends up happening.

 

DL

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  • 4 weeks later...

Oh dude, I hope you're not in the same situation...I ended up having to get 90% of my Mac replaced.

 

It turns out that the issue might not have been boot camp related at all, and it just happend to be that I was playing with Boot Camp while my machine acted up. The shop I took it to couldn't get it loading, and they said that's usually an issue with the logic board. So I got that replaced.

 

Once they put it in, they were able to get to a screen with a question mark, which I guess means that it can't find the drive. My drive wasn't mountable AT ALL! They even tried putting it into an external enclosure and mounting it as a secondary hard drive...no go!

 

So I had to get my hard drive replaced as well (which took ages to come in. Luckily the guy at the shop was awesome and gave me a loaner hard drive in the meantime so I could actually use my Mac).

 

So now everything is happy, but what an ordeal! Just to be safe, I'm not putting boot camp on until its finalized with Leopard (I have my work laptop to do windows stuff anyway).

 

I hope your situation gets resolved with less headache than mine did.

 

D

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  • 1 month later...

Hi,

I just got the same problem, although it had nothing to do with boot camp. I was having trouble w/my firewire port, and the mac "genius" I got on tech support had me reboot holding option-apple-p-r, and only hold it for TWO chimes. Anyway, I have the white screen of death. Seems like they had no prayer in salvaging your data from your hard drive? is that right? Did you take it to a genius bar, or did you mail it in to apple, or go to a third party?

Anyone else have the same issue?

I have a new macbook pro core 2 duo.

Thanks!

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  • 5 months later...

I'm having this same problem. Just bought an Intel iMac and quit out of bootcamp windows installation.

I can't get out of the white screen. I've..

-held down c with the start up disc

-held down d with the start up disc

-" " alt

-" " alt, p, r

-" " alt, apple, p, r (both 2 and 3 chimes)

 

What can I do??? Is there anything I can do?

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  • 2 weeks later...
  • 1 month later...

I had the exact same problem with my brand new Macbook Pro!

 

Seems quite a lot of people has this problem, and not a single word from Apple? Nice one.

 

Other threads with same problem:

http://forums.macnn.com/104/alternative-op...t-camp-windows/

 

http://www.macfixitforums.com/showflat.php...=31&fpart=1

 

http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=329711

 

My Macbook is completely dead, since it it newer than ten days, I am trying to get it replaced, but this seems absolutely ridiculous. Apple has to be aware of this problem, yet not a single word from them?

 

I can imagine my worst nightmare coming to reality. I'm sure Apple will call me in a week and tell me I have to play for a completely new Macbook, or several parts that they choose to replace instead. Damn...

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  • 2 weeks later...

The solution ain't pretty

Had the same problem and ended up taking apart my iMac (bye bye warranty), took out the hard drive and put in my XP box, deleted the partitions and then dropped back in the iMac. Ran disk utility and partioned it, then installed 10.4 and it's working great.

 

PorkChop66

A Computer Geek at some College

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  • 3 weeks later...

I saw the incorrect partition size in the Win XP installer, exited, and was presented with the Grey Screen of Death.

 

I was able to recover everything by booting off an external firewire with OS X installed. From there I used iPartition to delete the Windows partition, and I imagine, in the process, it corrected the partition map.

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  • 11 months later...

FYI, I tried resetting PRAM, CD, etc and was finally able get past the white screen by disconnecting my firewire drive. I then reconnected and it seems to be working fine.

 

Time Machine related? Maybe it hung on a backup when I shut down?

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I tried to install XP on BootCamp, but it would not boot off of CD. I got the white screen of death. Long story short...

 

Pressed and held C while powering on until it forcibly booted off of the OSX Leopard boot disk. After selecting the language, click "more information". In one of the menu at the top, one can select the boot drive (hard disk) and select Reboot. It does and it did. I'm back to my ol' OSX again.

 

Not sure why BootCamp doesn't work and why I can't boot off a bootable XP disk.

 

Maybe I'll have to resort to a free/cheap virtualization as a workaround. I don't really want to pay $80 for Parallels.

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