MacBook Air Black Screen

MacBook Air Black Screen: It Boots with Black Screen

MacBook Air Black Screen: Very rarely, your Mac may encounter some issue during the system boot, like booting to a completely black screen. In some particularly rare cases, this situation can be interpreted as a sign of a potential hardware issue. Fortunately, there are a few very simple troubleshooting steps to try to fix it. So, if your MacBook Air will not boot up past black screen and cursor, you should proceed as follows:

Shut the MacBook Air down by holding the power button for ten seconds.
Restart the Mac and press shift at the same time until you see the progress bar start moving.
Once you reach the point where your screen goes dark and you see the cursor, type the first letter of the username for your computer, then hit Enter. Type your password and then hit Enter again.
After a moment, you should see the spinning beach ball and the screen should then move on to something along the lines of “Completing OSX Installation”. Allow it to finish.
Now the computer should go to its normal desktop and the issue should be fixed.

Don’t worry if the screen of your Mac goes pitch black during this process, just hit the space bar (Since the screen can go to sleep during this time.)

If some features and apps don’t show up after the reboot, repeat the process.

Apparently, this issue can be related to an automatic update that never quite got past the login screen.

There is also another way of fixing the issue, but we don’t recommend it unless you are a computer guru:

Back up all your date with Time Machine, so once you restart the computer, you can get everything reloaded. Remember that if you haven’t backed up all your files, there’s a good chance you will lose them.
Press command R as it starts up and keep holding down until disk utility starts.
Go to disk utility and click Erase Macintosh HD.
Go back to the menu and select install Mavericks OSX.

Just installing Mavericks without erasing the old one won’t work, so only try this method if you know what you are doing with your computer.

Some experts suggest that if the above tricks fail, a PRAM reset can do the trick. Many of the computer gurus have tried this solution and can attest to it.
As a potential solution to the black screen on boot issue, try this while restarting. (It is very similar to an SMC reset):

Reboot the Mac Air.
As soon as you hear the boot chime, hold down the Command + Option + P + R keys together.
As soon as you hear the boot sound again, the PRAM has been reset.

At this point, let your Mac Air boot and load OS X again as usual. It will no longer have the black display!