A Foolproof Approach to Fix Gray Screen of Death on Your Mac OS X

A vast majority of Mac users seem to be oblivious on how to get their system past the deadly gray screen of death received at the very startup. More often than not, the users having a bad drive or a defective RAM are the ones who encounter multiple occurrences of this screen. The problem sometimes occurs when you restart your Mac after downloading the latest updates. There could be several things that can get your Mac stuck at this Gray screen, ranging from a sick hard drive to disk corruption to bad permissions on system files and folders.

You should follow the given procedure to work around this Gray screen of death and make your Mac bootable again:

NOTE: You should power off your Mac before proceeding to the next steps.

Reset PRAM

Restart your Mac while holding down the four keys on your keyboard: 'OPTION', 'COMMAND', 'P', and 'R'. You should keep pressing these keys until you hear three Mac chimes repeatedly. Once this is done, allow your Mac to boot normally. If you encounter a boot failure, follow the next step.

Restore Firmware

If you have an Intel-based Mac, you can restore your firmware through the Apple Firmware Restoration CD as follows:

• Restart your Mac and keep pressing the Power button. You need to press this until there is a series of three long tones, three short tones, and three long tones.
• Insert the Firmware Restoration CD into your Mac's optical drive and release the button. When the recovery process begins, you will hear a long tone. When the process is completed, your Mac will restart.

Repair Disk Using Disk Utility

• Insert the OS X Installation CD into your Mac's CD/DVD drive.
• Reboot your Mac while holding the 'C' key down.
• At the Installer window, select 'Utilities' and click 'Disk Utility'.
• Choose your startup disk from the left pane of the Disk Utility window and then click the 'Repair Disk' button.
• Disk Utility begins repairing your boot volume.  

If the process completes successfully, you will be able to restart your Mac. However, if you have no luck with the Disk Utility too, use professional Mac data recovery software to recover all your lost invaluable data. These software are available as a bootable DVD using which you can boot into your Mac and recover every bit of inaccessible data absolutely intact. Further, these software are compatible with Mac OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion.