Chosen Solution
I have a 2011 17" with a broken GPU just gathering dust, it boot loops since the GPU is dead(or something similar, not sure about that). IMO the quality of the chassis is still above most windows Laptops and is definitely worth saving, so I decided to try to install Chrome OS Flex, I tough it could do with just the iGPU and if it never turns on the dGPU it would work fine. Anyway I put a Chrome OS Flex installer on a USB-Stick and booted from it, though the moment I clicked on “boot from disk” the screen froze, so I just gave it some time.After some time it started talking to me(some sort of setup assistant must have activated), the Screen was still frozen but after navigating using the assistant I managed to get the Mac to run Chrome OS Flex from the USB-Stick.I now had a working OS just without the Display so I decided to restart the Mac and see what it would do.Sadly it just booted normal into MacOS, where it detects that the GPU is dead and boot loops all the time.So I tried the same thing again(and again…), only for the screen to freeze at the same time, but this time the speakers didn’t work(red headphone jack), although headphones worked flawless. Does anyone know of a way/how to make my way work to give this great chassis a second life?
The only way to make this MBP work again is to deactivate the AMD graphic chip and run only with the Intel graphics. Then you’ll get the same performance than the 13" MBP 2011. I bought the Tiresias module from CMIzapper (www.CMIzapper.com) and installed it on my MBP 17" 2011 with success. This small module is soldered onto the MBP rom chip and bypass the AMD chip. Check the procedure on their web site: http://www.cmizapper.com/products/tiresi…
