Chosen Solution
Hi all, I have an early 2011 Unibody MacBook Pro 15", and I can’t get it to power up. I rarely use this machine these days, but keep it plugged in all the time, because it non longer worked on battery power. I tried waking it from sleep today, and when it wouldn’t, I tried restarting it– holding the power button down, etc. to no avail. Black screen. Tried the SMC reset for unibody Macbooks several times. Didn’t seem to help. Still wouldn’t start up. I took off the back and unplugged the battery. Still wouldn’t start up, with only AC power. I finally got it to start up, to an extent, by unplugging the Magsafe power plug, holding down the power button for 5 seconds, and putting the Magsafe back in while holding the power button down. That got the fans whirring on high, the screen lit up with the Apple, chimes… Great! But now it keeps restarting itself in this high-fan mode, and never gets any further than the apple screen before it shuts down and starts the process over again. I tried resetting the PRAM a couple of times (and got the second chime), but that didn’t seem to make a difference. What else can I try?? Any ideas would be so appreciated!! Update (01/08/2018) Hi Joe, I will add that I’d read that the revving of the fans is an expected response when you boot the system in this way– plugging in the AC while the power button is depressed. Don’t ask me why, but I guess this is normal behavior for a Mac. I wanted to try it, just to confirm that the thing is still “alive,” to some extent. My point was, it does get this far, and enables the machine to sort of start up– I just am not sure what to do from hereon in. I could try booting from an external drive, but am not sure how I would do this, since pressing the power button with the AC plugged in does nothing. Hmm.
I would suggest cleaning out the cooling system and replacing the thermal paste for starters, next I would attempt to boot off of external media. This could be an external drive with a cloned os. Or it could be your install media such as a lion flash drive, etc. If you get one of those to boot then run disk utility and check your disk for errors and such. If none of that works you may be dealing with logic board issues.
