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My iMac screen is grey and I'm sure it has booted up completely. I am able to use the backlight keys on the keyboard to increase and decrease the screen brightness. I'm afraid it's probably a hardware issue, but before I go any further I wanted to see if anyone else has had a similar issue.

First, there's some history. My hard drive died a while back and my iMac did the grey screen thing on startup that many have experiences. I was able to boot from my Snow Leopard DVD and started working off of an external FW hard drive. As cheap as hard drives are, I've been in a financial pinch and other things have taken priority over getting a new drive. But the temporary external drive solution was working fine. Then one day I found my iMac with a grey screen again. I verified that the external drive was still working, tried booting from my DVD, and restarted several times with no success. I suspected that maybe the internal drive somehow causing a startup conflict and that maybe if I disconnected the drive I could startup from my external drive again. Yesterday, using the iFixit guide, I opened up my iMac, took the hard drive out and reassembled. Unfortunately this does not seem to have done a damn thing. I still have a grey screen.

The activity light on my external drive is active upon startup for a good minute or so as i would expect. Again I can adjust the display brightness, and I also verified WiFi activity and open ports using the Scany app on my iPhone.

All of the "grey screen" issues I've come across online seem to be related to a startup issue and those are mostly due to a hard drive issue. I've not found anything discussing a continuous grey screen.

Has anyone experienced this? Is there a fix? Any suggestions?

Thanks

Edit: Forgot to mention which model I have. Early 2008 20" iMac - the last model with firewire 400.

[ibook_steve]

Can you hook up an external display and see if you're at the desktop? This could be a video cable issue.

Steve

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Not today, but that's a great idea. I'll post back when I can make this happen.

Thanks ibook_steve

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OK, so I was finally able to get this done.

While still working off my external hard drive, connected an external monitor and started up. At first it didn't look like the external monitor was even getting a signal, but after a few minutes, it kicked on. My iMac screen remained a light grey. It was in extended mode and the menu bar etc. were on the iMac display. I sat there for a while trying to blindly click on anything on the other screen and drag it over to the extended desktop. Then for some reason the iMac display started to work. I quickly set the display preferences to mirror incase the iMac display went out again. With that working, I shut down and installed my new HD. After reassemble the iMac display continued to work. Did a clean install of the OS, imported my persona off another Mac I've been using and after a couple days all seems to be going well.

I have no idea why the display went all grey or why it just came back, but there you have it.