My MacBook Pro is not booting at all. I try to power it on and I hear the optical drive spin but no chime and the screen remains black. The battery indicator light on the side works as does the keyboard(caps lock lights up). After about 5 min of nothing it automatically shuts off. I tried resetting the SMC and same issue. I replaced the RAM sticks and still same problem. I then removed both RAM sticks and tried to boot up and got several beeps upon powering up. I am thinking it is the logic board or the GPU after looking around the Internet. For the past few months I've had this problem intermittently. I would power on and I would get the chime but a black screen for a couple minutes before it started to boot correctly but this is the first time I haven't gotten the chime. Would it be a battery problem? Logic board battery? Any advice would be helpful. Thanks!
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Logic Board?
- Thread starter alexmb
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I would suspect that you may have a bad PRAM battery, or one that is going bad. (Although, since you said that the issue used to just be temporary, but now seems to be permanent, leads me to suspect that the PRAM battery was previously going bad, but is now completely dead.)
Note: PRAM battery is not the same battery that is used to provide main power to your system. It is much smaller, and for lack of a better description, kind of looks like somebody took a small watch battery, stuck a couple wires around it, and then wrapped it all up in plastic insulation, leaving the two wires sticking out (+ and -). Can't get to it without removing the logic board from the notebook chassis, so it's not a very easy/quick job to replace.
Note: PRAM battery is not the same battery that is used to provide main power to your system. It is much smaller, and for lack of a better description, kind of looks like somebody took a small watch battery, stuck a couple wires around it, and then wrapped it all up in plastic insulation, leaving the two wires sticking out (+ and -). Can't get to it without removing the logic board from the notebook chassis, so it's not a very easy/quick job to replace.
Your system has PRAM, but not a PRAM battery. (Your first post did not specify which MBP you had, so I suggested PRAM battery as a possibility, because the symptoms you described could be caused by that ... in systems that have a PRAM battery.)
The PRAM batteries provided a trickle of power to PRAM to keep system time and a few other settings functioning. In the unibody MBP's, the function of the PRAM battery is now done by the main internal battery of the MBP, and a lot of the data that was managed previously by the PRAM (in earlier MBPs) has been moved elsewhere, so that these days the PRAM only deals with a handful items whereas before they'd handle two to three times as much things. With that in mind, it could also be possible that your main battery is having issues. You'll have to take in to an authorized service provider or an Apple store to get it looked at to verify that.
If it's the logic board, you'll also need to take it in to be verified. So, either way, you'll need to take it in somewhere to get looked at.
The PRAM batteries provided a trickle of power to PRAM to keep system time and a few other settings functioning. In the unibody MBP's, the function of the PRAM battery is now done by the main internal battery of the MBP, and a lot of the data that was managed previously by the PRAM (in earlier MBPs) has been moved elsewhere, so that these days the PRAM only deals with a handful items whereas before they'd handle two to three times as much things. With that in mind, it could also be possible that your main battery is having issues. You'll have to take in to an authorized service provider or an Apple store to get it looked at to verify that.
If it's the logic board, you'll also need to take it in to be verified. So, either way, you'll need to take it in somewhere to get looked at.