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Black screen, white text on new MBA.

J

Jonesy85

macrumors member
Original poster
Aug 28, 2008
67
0
I just received my new 11.6" MBA today and am having this problem. The very first time I turned it on, I got a black screen with white text. The text scrolled down for a few seconds, then the machine booted up normally. I then played around on it for a couple hours with no problems, web browsing and watching youtube videos. But then after I closed the lid and let it set for a few hours, I came back to it, opened it up, and the computer was off. So I press the power button and the exact same process happens again.

I just now restarted the computer to see if the black screen with white text would happen again, and it did. Anyone know what this could be?
 
ImperialX

ImperialX

macrumors 65816
Jul 17, 2007
1,339
23
Tokyo, Japan
Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_1 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/532.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0.5 Mobile/8B117 Safari/6531.22.7)

What does the text say?
 
J

Jonesy85

macrumors member
Original poster
Aug 28, 2008
67
0
I'm not sure, I'll have to look next time and try to remember some of it. It's not like a couple sentences. It's pages of text. I remember that some of it was saying a lot of "off=====on" or something similar. I'll restart soon and look again.
 
J

Jonesy85

macrumors member
Original poster
Aug 28, 2008
67
0
Yeah, I figure I'll just return it. I purchased it online since there's no Apple store near me, so it sucks that I'll have to mail it back and wait for another one, but that's what I'll do. Thanks. :)
 
Scottsdale

Scottsdale

Suspended
Sep 19, 2008
4,473
283
U.S.A.
Are you sure that's just not the welcome video that shows a bunch of languages saying welcome?

Sounds like it to me...
 
J

Jonesy85

macrumors member
Original poster
Aug 28, 2008
67
0
It's not the welcome screen that plays when you first turn a mac on. I know what that is. It only happens when I restart the computer, or if I have the lid closed for any extended amount of time. If I open it up right after I close it, or a couple of minutes after, it's fine, but any longer and the computer is turned off, or at least the screen is solid black and I have to turn it on to get it going again. No clicking the trackpad or hitting any key wakes it up, it's just off, as far as I can tell.

The white text moves fast and it lasts quite a few seconds. It happens a few seconds after I choose to shut the computer down or restart, and again when I turn the computer on. It looks to me that the text is going through a checklist of what needs to be done. Like, airport off======on" or something similar to that.

What do you mean KnightWRX?
 
R

re2st

macrumors regular
May 2, 2007
207
4
San Jose, CA
Jonesy85 said:
It's not the welcome screen that plays when you first turn a mac on. I know what that is. It only happens when I restart the computer, or if I have the lid closed for any extended amount of time. If I open it up right after I close it, or a couple of minutes after, it's fine, but any longer and the computer is turned off, or at least the screen is solid black and I have to turn it on to get it going again. No clicking the trackpad or hitting any key wakes it up, it's just off, as far as I can tell.

The white text moves fast and it lasts quite a few seconds. It happens a few seconds after I choose to shut the computer down or restart, and again when I turn the computer on. It looks to me that the text is going through a checklist of what needs to be done. Like, airport off======on" or something similar to that.

What do you mean KnightWRX?
Click to expand...

Sounds like the infamous GSOD. Could be software/hardware related. try to re-install the OS first. If it doesn't work, then you should exchange it.
 
KnightWRX

KnightWRX

macrumors Pentium
Jan 28, 2009
15,046
4
Quebec, Canada
J

Jonesy85

macrumors member
Original poster
Aug 28, 2008
67
0
KnightWRX said:
Actually, it's called Verbose Boot Mode, I posted from my iPhone and couldn't quite look it up. Here's an article about it :

http://osxdaily.com/2007/03/25/always-boot-mac-os-x-in-verbose-mode/

It has nothing to do with the OS, so reinstalling OS X won't solve the problem. Look if boot-args is set to -v with nvram -p and if it is (and it probably is from your description) just issue a sudo nvram boot-args=
Click to expand...

You were right :). I followed that article and it fixed the problem. Thank you for your help. That's odd that the computer shipped with that set like that.
 
KnightWRX

KnightWRX

macrumors Pentium
Jan 28, 2009
15,046
4
Quebec, Canada
No problem. Your description was okay, but credit goes to other posters who had the same issue with their MacBook airs and asked about it in the previous week. Your description gave me an impression of deja vu. It seems a few units shipped with verbose mode on, maybe units that had to go through QA and didn't get reset properly to a shipping state.
 
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