Early 2011 MBP - crashed now won't turn on

I've had my 17 inch early 2011 MBP since new and in that time have upgrades the ram to 8GB, installed and SSD and a HDD in the optimal and most recently installed the wireless card from the later model to enable hand off.
Over the past year or so I have been having random crash issues where it would suddenly turn off. Not necessarily associated with periods of high workload. Each time though I could just turn it back on and all was fine. Today however, whilst working in Adobe Lightroom after just in porting some photos from an SD in the express card reader ( the fans had been going for it to cool things down and I had a load of safari windows open as well as windows running in parallels) it crashed to off and now won't turn back on.

What it does do:
I can press the power button and the front light comes on.
I can hear the hard drive start to spin.
The fans come on (normal speed not fast)
The MBP was running on battery at the time (about 50% ish I think), but I have subsequently been able to charge in back up (MagSafe connector went from green to orange then back to green when full.
The battery indicator on the side works
However no signs of keyboard or screen life at all! Cannot get the keyboard backlight or caps light etc.

Things I've tried
Disconnection the battery twice to reset the SMC.
Resetting the PRAM
Powering on whilst the optibay HDD was disconnected
Starting up in safe mode (holding shift)
Starting up the hard wear test (holding D).
Removing the ram and then testing them in different slots one at a time.

What I am noticing though is that the board is getting quite hot between the fans even though it hasn't even turned on and it's only had the front light on for a short period of time.
When the front light comes on it start of bright but then fades quite a bit. Charge lights and MagSafe lights are all strong though.

Is there anything else worth testing or is it Apple store time (unfortunately my 3 year Apple care was up a good 9 or so months ago now). I've heard logic board mentioned a number of times. Does anyone know if this can still be done for my model of MBP and how much it costs in the UK?

Thanks in advance.

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Oh and there's no water or shock damage.

Would that stop it from turning on? Wouldn't it just boot up using the integrated graphics and then die at a point when it tried to switch to use the discrete card? It would have been using the discrete card at the time it went as I was doing some photo editing.

Could it be anything else?

Skika said:

Had the same problem, there is a solution that will let you boot up but the graphics will be horrible and slow, i don't remember by heart but there is a process that you do and it deletes the amd drivers which let you boot. Will try to find it.

edit:found a video

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iyDu-Y_G1D8

Click to expand...

Thanks I might give that a go.
I have had a busy couple of days with work, but did get round to starting to refit the original disk drive, wifi card and SSD before taking it in to the genius bar, (booked in for Monday).

I've been thinking about doing a clean install of OSX on the original drive, which I'm hoping I can do as an external drive to my MBA and then put in my MBP. Mainly so that the drive I've been using can stay safe and sound with me in case it gets sent off for repair, but it might also give me a chance to try out the driver deletion .

Its out of its extended three year warranty anyway now, so there isn't anything to void there really, but do you think if I mention that its had a HDD in the optibay then they may try to use that as an argument for why I would have to pay for any repair. Or just be honest if asked, as I guess they would be able to tell anyway?

^ Well that's where I'll be taking mine so fingers crossed they're helpful.

I re installed the optical drive, the original wifi card and SSD last night. I used my MBA to do a clean install of OSX onto the SSD. I dont have the original ram anymore so it still has the Kingston ram in it.

It's not helped as it still wont turn on.

with the disk drive back in it does now fire that up when i press the power button, but nothing more.

So I now get:

Sleep/wake light
battery indicator
disk drive life
fans come on ('normal' speed almost silent)
(now that ive taken the optibay hdd out i don't get any noise from that and the main disk is an SSD, so cant tell if there's life in that.

I'll update when I've been to the Apple store so anyone else with similar symptoms might get a better idea of what it might be, (cant think its anything other than the logic board now though).

Is there anyway to view, or do Apple keep a copy of the ones I sent them, the crash reports that are shown when restarting after your machine has crashed?

As I've said I have had recurring crashes for well over a year now and have reported some if not all back to Apple. I never paid much attention to them at the time, as I was aware for Radeongate, but thought the symptoms were only seen as display errors (bars colouration etc) rather than crashes.

I'm hoping that if the ones i sent back to Apple are recorded, that they can see I was having problems before my Apple care ran out (ok, long shot that they take this into account I know, but every little helps right?).

Well I took it in to the Geniuses yesterday as i popped in on the off chance they had a free appointment. After about 5-10 minutes of going through with them what I'd tried and them trying some things too then they too concluded it's most likely the logic board.

Thankfully, as others here have suggested, after asking if they could help me out under EU consumer law, they were willing to replace the board for free and it should be ready in about a week or so.

Ok so its a pain that this flaw exists in such a high price item, but in my case Apple's customer service has been flawless! Very happy!

I know it seems to be that these often fail too, and from what I can see, much sooner than the original, but still, it should get my machine up and running again.

Thanks for the advice everyone.

From the threads I've seen in relation to this there does seem to be a theme that on the third failure they replace the machine (keeping the old one from what I can gather). And I'm sure I even saw one post where someone got theirs replaced on the first instance as the store couldn't get hold of the part to carry out the repair!

No news from my store yet, although they did say it would take 5-7 days from getting the part in and it's only been 4 in total so far, so probably only half way there to getting it back.

So I got my MBP back from the Apple store near me yesterday lunchtime and now everything is working fine again from the short amount of use I gave it last night.

So it was a case of:
-Died on Saturday night
-Due to other commitments I eventually managed to get in a walk in appointment at an Apple store genius bar the following Friday, where I had a pleasant chat with them and they offered a free logic board replacement
-Picked up and working again the following Wednesday.

So from my experience, whilst the failure is obviously annoying and not something you'd expect from such a highly priced item, the aftercare has been way in advance of anything else I've experienced! To be able to take a not far off four year old device in to a local store, (just luck of the draw that its all of a 5 minute detour on my way home from work), and have absolutely no trouble from them diagnosing, (reconfirming what was already expected), the problem and offering a free repair is exceptional! I'm sure if I'd been dealing with any other major retailer in the UK, (even with the various UK and EU laws), I'd be hard pressed to get anything done even if it were still in the first year since purchase, let alone way beyond that, (and I'd hate to think about the turn around times they would have / mistakes they would make). Needless to say this bit of work on the part of Apple has me fully on board with my continued buy in to their products and I shan't be going anywhere other than direct with them when I upgrade. I just hope that for everyone else's sake they offer a similar service globally as it is a known fault with the 2011 models.

The work has a 90 day warranty, but fingers crossed it has no trouble for a good while longer, (my plan is to hopefully replace it once the Skylake MBPs appear).