Macbook Pro won't boot past white screen.

First of all, I want to say that I've already sent my MBP off to be repaired, so no tips would really help. I really just want to know if anyone had an issue like mine and what the problem was.

So... Friday morning, I turned on my MBP and was greeted by the normal 'BONG' and the white screen, then a few seconds later the hard drive started to make some bad noise and I immediately shut it off. I turned it back on and it would not go past the initial white screen. It made the 'BONG' noise so it does try to boot I guess. However, it will not go past the white screen. I don't believe it's the hard drive because I cannot even boot from CD and the guy at the Apple store couldn't boot off of his firewire drive. I believe it's the motherboard that failed, but why it failed I'm not sure.

The night before everything was working fine. I was doing some casual web surfing and nothing else. I shut it down and put it on the charger for the night. Nothing out of the ordinary. I was totally surprised when it wouldn't start.

When I tried to boot from Bootcamp, it does not show anything except for the mouse, which does work. No drives show up at all.

Here are my specs:
MacBook Pro 15"
512MB 8600 GT Graphics
4GB RAM
200GB 7200RPM Hard drive
2.5Ghz Core 2 Duo
Bought in the beginning of June.

Things I tried to do to remedy the problem:
SMC reset
NVRAM reset
PRAM reset
reseat RAM modules

Any ideas?

CaptainChunk said:

Sorry to hear about your problem!

Funny... Mine did the EXACT same thing you're describing about 3 months ago. I ended up with a new logic board and a new hard drive.

My problem happened while I was saving a document in Word and all of a sudden, the spinning color wheel showed up. Moments later, the whole machine locked up and I had to do a hard power down.

After powering back on, a got the normal "BONG", but just a blank white screen with no Apple logo and funny sounding clicks from the hard drive. It wouldn't boot off a CD, external FireWire drive, nothing.

I dropped the MBP off at the local mom and pop shop and got it back in about a week. Luckily, I had three other machines to work on.

Click to expand...

Unfortunately, I didn't have an extra machine and had to drive 4.5 hours back home to get my old Dell to use for the next few weeks.

I never tried single user mode, but I can't try it and doubt it would have worked. I tried starting diagnostics by holding down D when I turned it on and it wouldn't even go into that. I'm not sure if the hard drive is bad. It is still wirring and clicks like it's reading it, but nothing happens. It could be the SATA on the drive of logic board is fried. I'm really just looking for causes. I didn't do anything that I think would have fried it. No bad weather and it's on a surge strip. Again, my machine is somewhere between Jackson, MS, and Houston, TX, according to Apple Support.

Doesn't opening up the machine void the warranty? It has 10+ screws keeping the keyboard on for a reason, and I'm sure it's probably to keep the end user out.

iJesus said:

I'm sure it's the hard drive. I have a MBP and I have had this happen to me twice. Hard drive has died.

They did upgrade the hard drive for free though.

Click to expand...

Does anyone know if the Hitachi 200GB 7200RPM hard drives are notoriously unreliable?

CaptainChunk said:

I couldn't say whether they are or not. The problem (very similar to the one described in this thread) I had in the past involved a fried logic board that in turn killed the hard drive; or it could have been the other way around - who knows?

But I've owned several Hitachi drives in the past and none of them have given me any problems - they all still function.

Click to expand...

Well they're ready to ship the laptop back. They replaced the hard drive, top case, and keyboard.

The top case was scratched up by the laptop rubbing itself in my book bag, and I'm not sure what they found wrong with the keyboard unless they replaced the trackpad which was giving me heck. I want to say they replaced the hard drive controller (but not the logic board) if that makes sense.

Well I just got my laptop back after some shipping errors.
Here's what they replaced with the numbers and descriptions:

655-1413A DA, HITACHI DOLPHIN-C SATA 200GB HDD-7200RPM
632-0636 FLEX ASSY,SATA-HDD/IR/SIL,M87
016-0028 RESTORE: OS Software to latest update
658-0346 ASSY,KEYBOARD,M87
605-1617 TOP CASE ASSY
605-1453 PCBA.MLB,2.5GHZ,THERM,M87

I can pretty much figure out what all of them are except the last one... Is this a new processor? Or new thermal greese?
I also noticed the 'latest update' was 10.5.3. Haha... I also noticed OSX was taking up 20GB of my drive just clean back from repair. I thought it was a little much and am reinstalling OSX from CD. It's my first experience and so far it's going well. My 1st disk was dirty and couldn't be read, but a soft wet rag fixed that. I think it had the residue from the adhesive from the plastic sleeve.

Kind of sad they didn't replace the logic board so I don't have to send it in for a GPU failure as soon. It's really sad that Nvidia's defect has affected so many. I've seen so many threads on bad GPU's that I'm fairly convinced that the current MBP's are affected by the defect.

I like that they replaced the top case. It was getting scratched up by itself from being in my bookbag. I have a different bookbag that shouldn't cause that (designed for laptops) and it really did bother me because it wasn't something I could just clean up. My poor old Dell Inspiron E1505 still looks good and I must give it to dell that they had a good case design with this laptop. If it was only not 1.5" thick and weighed what it feels like to be 10lbs. It's served me well, and has gone through a lot of abuse (a little kid once tried to saw through it with a hacksaw) I was able to sand out the spot and it looks like new. The Mac wouldn't look that way after a hacksaw. Haha...

I'm just glad I don't have to use this Dell anymore. Battery life sucks, and even though I only have like 100 cycles on the battery, it won't last more than 40 minutes and the wear level is over 50% after one year. Dell, of course, won't replace it because it's over a year old.

Well, afraid of being bashed for liking this old clunky Dell, I'm going to end this post. If anyone knows what that last part is above, please tell me. I searched on Google for the number but it didn't come up.

Thanks,

Ryan

After they replaced and fixed it, I had a lot of trouble with my trackpad. I sent it in twice and each time they replaced the top case and logic board, without any fix. They then replaced the whole laptop with a new 15" Unibody MBP, and so far it's been pretty good minus a bad key when I received it.

Just to let you know, the problem was over a year ago with a different laptop. It was the logic board and the hard drive at fault.