MacBook Pro 15” not booting

[Zak99]

Hi,

My 15” MacBook Pro (fixed battery) is misbehaving. It won’t boot, I only get as far as the small white light on the front of the case on the right. I get a noise like disc startup I guess. The screen stays totally blank. It happened a couple of times before but either just started working after the battery went flat or I’d vaguely fumbled about with nvram, PRAM resets etc.

This time it won’t go. Problem started possibly after High Sierra upgrade via Apple Support a few months ago. It’s as if it’s slept like when the lid is closed I think.

Any ideas please?

Rgds

 

[Zak99]

Wanted to add, the fan starts to run after a while. And also if I close the lid the white light on front gets brighter and then dims again when opened.

So there’s a bit of a brain in there still. I mean in the Mac not me !!

 

[honestone]

OK, need to ask some questions, and make some observations/suggestions:

1. What exact Mac model do you have?

2. I assume you upgraded "in place" to High Sierra, that is, basically have High Sierra overwrite what was on your machine. Is that correct?

3. What Mac OS did you upgrade from?

4. Have you ever done an disk cleanup/maintenance/repairs, from a software perspective? By that I mean have you ever run any disk-related software to help with those tasks? There are some excellent products available (both free and commercial) that can help you with that.

5. This is critical: are you making backups to an external device? If you are, what software are you using for that?

6. What third party (ie, non-Apple) software are you using? Along with that, it is important to insure that such software is compatible with whatever OS you plan on upgrading to. This site can help you with that:

https://roaringapps.com/apps

7. As "part" of #4 above, do you have either CleanMyMac or MacKeeper? If you do, they are bad, and you need to get rid of them immediately. There are some excellent, free products available that do the same tasks (some do more), and they are safe, reliable, and trouble-free.

8. How are you making posts here? Are you using another Mac? If so, what exact model is it?

OK, now for some observations/suggestions:

1. Assuming you have a backup, and assuming your machine is as "clean" as possible (especially free from any "rogue" software), it would be best to check out your internal drive for its health. The one way to do that (assuming the machine can boot to it) is to boot to the (hidden) Recovery HD partition. This link describes how to do that:

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201314

Once you boot to that (again, you MUST have a backup), you would select the "Disk Utility" option.

2. If the drive is "bad" (ie, beyond software repair), it will need to be replaced. But assuming it is OK, it might be good if you do a fresh. clean, "virgin" installation of High Sierra, and then "migrate"/copy stuff from your backup. That task will be arduous with a Time Machine backup, but easier (and you would have more control) with either a SuperDuper! or Carbon Copy Cloner bootable backup.

 

[Zak99]

Honestone,

Thanks for your help again. Turned out either my logic or display board were knackered. The drive was Ok so I ended up buying another MacBook and copying data across.

Thanks for your advice again