MacBook Pro boots to black screen

A little while ago I went to pickup my MacBook Pro from the table and noticed it was extremely hot to the touch. It was supposed to be asleep, but for some reason had come back on. The fans were running at full speed, so I opened it up and instead of going through the shutdown process, I held down the power button to turn it off.

I let it cool down a bit and then tried to boot it back up and the screen never seems to come on (it was working when I shut it down). I hear it turn on and the hard drive spin up, and the small light on the latch on the front comes on.

I've tried removing the battery and holding down the power button for several seconds to reset the PMU and also held down cmd+opt+p+r to reset the PRAM but I never see a grey screen, and it doesn't reboot itself like it's supposed to.

None of this has worked... does anyone know what I could do?

Yep, I tried reseating the RAM and I've tried it with the battery in plus AC, as well as the battery out while on AC... nothing


I tried calling Apple earlier but their phone support is closed and it said to try tomorrow... so I guess I'll spend Christmas day on the phone with them to see what can be done. If I have to send it in, this'll be the 3rd time....

I hooked up the external monitor that I use with it everyday, but it doesn't seem to get a signal even after sitting for a while (it just goes to power saving mode)... is there a way to make the external monitor the primary upon boot? (I use it as a secondary screen, not as a replacement for the laptop's display).

And this actually is the 3rd time for the display, really. The first time I sent it in, it was due to overheating as well as a faulty power inverter in the display (it was making it flicker and have really dark spots in the center). When I got it back, they replaced the logic board and heating fins, but didn't touch the display. I called them up and sent it back in and finally got the power inverter in the display replaced. It seemed fine after that, but after several weeks I would notice rarely that the screen would "jump" until I either rebooted it or put it to sleep and woke it back up. At first I thought it was an issue with just playing videos because it only happened while watching a DVD.. but it happened once and then never happened again for nearly a month.. and then it happened maybe two or three more times over several more weeks. Since I couldn't replicate it, I didn't know what it was, but a friend of mine who used to work at the Genius bar said he'd seen it on faulty power inverters. So assuming the display is what's wrong, this will be the 3rd time being sent in for that.

To illustrate what I meant by the screen jumping, the 2nd time it happened, I took a short video with my digital camera, although it started out much worse than this: http://heycubed.net/stuff/MVI_0404.AVI


My main concern right now is getting my data because it's my only Mac (I'm on a Windows computer now). I have it back up nightly to my home file server, but I haven't mounted the server's share folder for a few days and I don't know if it automatically connects to backup and then disconnects at night when it backs up or if it requires I already have the directory mounted (I use PSyncX).

I just got off the phone a little while ago with Apple Support. They put me through to some specialist who tried walking me through several things on the phone (all of which I had already tried) and of course nothing worked. I asked about getting it replaced since this was the 3rd time, but she claimed that the "3rd time's a charm" is in fact not an actual policy on their end.
Is there any documentation about this anywhere?

I'm taking it to an Apple Store this evening to see if someone there will replace the whole thing or at least can fix it... if not, I've got the specialist's extension and will call back tomorrow to get a box shipped to me to send it in yet again for repair.

The care-free attitude of "I know we can get this fixed... I just don't know how long it'll take" has really been very off-putting and I'm officially a hate of Apple Support. If I didn't like the actual product so much, I'd never do business with them again.
This is a business machine that I HAVE to have functional, and even after repeating this severla times, there's no sign of sympathy at all.

Also for the record since I started this thread 3 years ago when I was having issues... they ended up replacing the logic board and heat pipes yet again. Somehow the computer had come out of sleep while it was still closed and overheated the insides to the point of messing up a few components on the logic board, so unfortunately it wasn't anything I could have fixed myself anyway.

Although I had a ton of problems with it and had to send it in 3 times for replacement of parts, it's since been problem-free and I still have it today. The only issue is that the battery life has dwindled (as laptop batteries are prone to do) and it gets incredibly hot on the bottom.

I now have a Mac Pro that I use as my primary machine, however, so it only gets used when I'm traveling or sitting on the couch or something.