Macbook Start up question

"ZHP Sparky, the 5th" (e30s2k) 11/26/2019 at 11:56 • Filed to: None

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I’m not a mac person at all, but my wife is exclusively Team Apple so I sometimes have to deal with things I know nothing about in helping her maintain her sanity with technology (she also HATES it when technology doesn’t work to the point where her immediate reaction is to want to buy a new one). She has a mid-2012 Macbook Pro that has been doggedly slow recently so she has been wanting a new computer. But before doing so I went ahead and refreshed her computer up a bit with a SSD and 16GB of RAM. The results are incredibly impressive – it is now waaayy faster than my work computer (not a high bar – but it IS what I work with everyday, and her Macbook is essentially just a web browser/photo repository at this point) and she is blown away with how well it works now. It really is crazy quick again, quite proud of my results for less than $200.

Only one slight question – now when I start up the computer it spends about 5-10 seconds on a blank gray screen before the screen with the Apple logo and the status bar pops up. Once that happens it’s all super fast and boots up quickly, but that blank gray screen is new. Any ideas on what is causing this gray screen, and is it a sign of bad things to come?

I googled the topic and all I found were many posts about “the gray screen of death”…which sounds like Apple’s equivalent of a blue screen? All those cases appears to be situations where the computer just goes in to a gray screen at start up and won’t move beyond that, which is different from my case. I just want to make sure the newly arrived gray screen for a few seconds isn’t something I should be concerned about?

p.s. - realize this isn’t car related at all, so thanks Oppo! 

This is what we'll show whenever you publish anything on Kinja: > ZHP Sparky, the 5th 11/26/2019 at 12:05

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If it were a PC I’d tell you to go into the bios and change the boot order, as it was probably spending that time looking for a bootable source in another location before moving on to the ssd, but since it’s a mac idk.

Aremmes > ZHP Sparky, the 5th 11/26/2019 at 12:09

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What you see is not the Gray Screen Of Death® — that one occurs due to kernel panics and thus requires that the OS has already bootstrapped. Instead your gray startup screen comes from the UEFI firmware most likely testing the extra RAM and waiting for the SSD to become ready for I/O requests . Errors during startup usually result in the Sad Mac icon.

ZHP Sparky, the 5th > This is what we'll show whenever you publish anything on Kinja: 11/26/2019 at 12:09

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Hmm that’s a great point. I’ll have to dig around to figure out what the Mac equivalent of doing that is. It could just be looking for the old hard drive because that’s what it was told to do, and then resorting to the SSD as the only option when it realizes that. 

This is what we'll show whenever you publish anything on Kinja: > ZHP Sparky, the 5th 11/26/2019 at 12:11

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Did the SSD connect to a different port than the old optical drive, or is it in the same physical location?

ZHP Sparky, the 5th > Aremmes 11/26/2019 at 12:28

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Many thanks - I’m only a mere accountant who likes to tinker with things so much of that went well over my head. But in any case - sounds like what I’m encountering is normal? Or is there something I could/should do to help speed up this part of the startup process?

ZHP Sparky, the 5th > This is what we'll show whenever you publish anything on Kinja: 11/26/2019 at 12:29

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Same physical location - I don’t know if it searches for anything more than that (like a specific drive name) beyond that? Aremmes had an explanation that seems Mac specific and not alarming, so maybe this is just how it is which is totally acceptable. 

This is what we'll show whenever you publish anything on Kinja: > ZHP Sparky, the 5th 11/26/2019 at 12:34

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Sounds like Aremmes knows more about these things than either of us and it seems a reasonable explanation . 

ranwhenparked > ZHP Sparky, the 5th 11/26/2019 at 12:40

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Thats just what it does, mine (ca. 2015) always boots painfully slow, but runs fine otherwise. It’s why I don’t typically shut it down in routine use.

ttyymmnn > ZHP Sparky, the 5th 11/26/2019 at 12:40

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Does it eventually start up? Then it’s good.

Disclaimer: I’m 100% Team Apple but about 5% tech-intelligent. If you don’t get any errors and it eventually starts up, I’d call that good. 

ZHP Sparky, the 5th > ttyymmnn 11/26/2019 at 12:43

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Haha yes it runs just fine and very smoothly after about 5-10 secs on this screen. It’s only been a few days so just wanted to make sure this wasn’t a sign of impending doom. 

ZHP Sparky, the 5th > ranwhenparked 11/26/2019 at 12:44

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Good to know, thanks! 

ZHP Sparky, the 5th > This is what we'll show whenever you publish anything on Kinja: 11/26/2019 at 12:45

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Agreed, thanks regardless! 

Aremmes > ZHP Sparky, the 5th 11/26/2019 at 13:07

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It sounds completely normal to me. On PCs I normally expect the BIOS/UEFI to take longer to boot up when they have extra RAM installed. Modern Macs have UEFI too, with the only difference that Apple’s version doesn’t display text on the screen during startup and generally doesn’t allow customization. The Macs here at work spend a slightly longer than typical in startup when powered up since they have 32 GB of RAM to allow space for development environments. I wouldn’t sweat it - if anything, I’d make use of the sleep feature, which Macs do really well, to avoid the long boot time.

Highlander-Datsuns are Forever > ZHP Sparky, the 5th 11/26/2019 at 13:07

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Why is the computer being turned off? There is no reason to turn it off unless you are transporting it. I haven’t turned my Macbook pro off in over a year. I just put in to sleep mode.

ZHP Sparky, the 5th > Aremmes 11/26/2019 at 13:31

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Many thanks, appreciate your input and reassurances!

ZHP Sparky, the 5th > Highlander-Datsuns are Forever 11/26/2019 at 13:33

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Yeah it typically probably wouldn’t get turned on/off regularly - just that I noticed it after I installed the SSD and RAM, so tried powering down and back on to see if the gray screen came back. 

liam > ZHP Sparky, the 5th 11/26/2019 at 18:09

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If you really want to know what it is doing then do a verbose mode boot (instructions here: https://www.idownloadblog.com/2015/08/17/how-to-boot-your-mac-in-verbose-mode/ ). You will see it boot the kernel, set up the hardware etc. I have the mid-2012 MacBook Pro and so I suspect you will see it pause on the SD slot - I think it probes for all the possible things that might be in the slot  and has to time out on the probes. If you like seeing the action you can set verbose boot to be the default, but I suspect your wife will not like it :-)