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17" MBP perplexing boot/power problem

B

Be3G

macrumors member
Original poster
Sep 19, 2007
77
5
Hi all,

Got a weird set of problems with which I'd really appreciate your help. The Mac concerned is a late-2011 17" MBP with High Sierra (the final OS supported by Apple) as its primary boot partition and another partition running Snow Leopard too.

A couple of nights ago whilst in 10.13 the Mac ground to a halt such that I couldn't even call up the Force Quit window. I forced a reboot, but the progress meter under the Apple logo would get to 100% and then sit there indefinitely. Booting in verbose mode showed it hanging on some kind of APFS message – not an actual error, as far as I could tell. I then tried booting in to 10.6; that worked for a few minutes and then the same set of circumstances repeated itself with that OS too.

I tried SMC and NVRAM resets, and doing those did allow me to boot back in to 10.6 – but then the next reboot would fail until I did another round of resets. I also could never get back in to 10.13 again.

That was all with an OWC SSD as the boot drive. Fearing something was wrong with that I took it out and put back in the original HDD that came with the Mac, and installed 10.13 on it. This seemed to work but…

…All of the above was carried out plugged in to the mains. Once the newly installed OS on the old drive was working, I unplugged the Mac and took it with me to elsewhere in the house. A few minutes of use later, and the thing suddenly switched off completely. I tried turning it back on, but it switched off a few seconds after booting. I tried again, and it switched off just a second or two later.

Plugging it back in to power, it works fine – although the date/clock had reset indicating the Mac had really lost every possible electron of power. So I'm really stumped now. The battery is only a few years old, and up until a few days ago I was getting several hours of life out of it. What's caused the sudden change, and is it somehow related to the booting issue? Does anyone have any ideas?

(Also, intriguingly, this happened just as the reports about boot problems with old OSes running Avid software hit the Mac news circuit, and my Mac does have old Avid software on it though not the one reported to produce problems, so probably just a coincidence.)
 
Ah, err, sorry – I forgot to mention! The dGPU has hardly ever been used (I use gfxCardStatus to force iGPU only for increased battery life), and indeed the first time it powered off randomly it was just using the iGPU.

So yeah, am familiar with the Radeon problems but I'd be really surprised if that's the cause here – surely a failed GPU wouldn't cause the clock to reset to 00:00, for example.
 
"a failed GPU wouldn't cause the clock to reset to 00:00, for example."

Do these have some kind of "motherboard PRAM battery"?
If so, that could cause the "loss of memory" for the clock.
 
Nope, the Li-ion is non-removable so there's no PRAM battery present.
 
Right, well, I'm pleased to report I've managed to fix the suddenly-powering-off issue:

Tinkering with the laptop some more on Wednesday night I saw the battery drop-down in the menu bar was now saying ‘Replace now’. I knew the battery didn't really need replacing because it'd been working so well until a couple of days prior, so I started to wonder if either the SMC or the battery's own integrated microprocessor had become confused by the various SMC resets I forced upon it in order to get it to boot when the first problems arose.

So yesterday I opened up the laptop, disconnected the battery for a minute or so (and also held down the power button for a few seconds to drain any residual power), then put the laptop through a full old-fashioned battery calibration process (charge to 100%, rest for 2 hours, drain to 0%, rest for 5 hours, charge to 100%). And it's worked!! Today I can use the laptop fine on battery power, and I've made sure to test the dGPU too and all's good there.

What I still don't know is what caused the initial booting problem that seemed to result in the drive being corrupt…

Anyway, two things to take away from this that'll maybe be useful to others:
  • Even though these non-removable batteries aren't supposed to require calibration (Apple have even removed the support article about how to calibrate batteries), calibration can still actually serve a useful purpose not just for third-party batteries but also OEM Apple ones too.
  • Something I haven't yet mentioned is that once or twice the laptop powered off randomly even when attached to the mains. This must be connected to the fact that Apple laptops throttle themselves when they have no battery attached, i.e. even when charging they depend on the battery for power. I thought that would be only under the highest-load scenarios but I wasn't doing anything intensive with the MBP, so it seems the dependence on battery power is a continuous thing regardless of load or charging state.
 
Be3G said:
Right, well, I'm pleased to report I've managed to fix the suddenly-powering-off issue:

Tinkering with the laptop some more on Wednesday night I saw the battery drop-down in the menu bar was now saying ‘Replace now’. I knew the battery didn't really need replacing because it'd been working so well until a couple of days prior, so I started to wonder if either the SMC or the battery's own integrated microprocessor had become confused by the various SMC resets I forced upon it in order to get it to boot when the first problems arose.

So yesterday I opened up the laptop, disconnected the battery for a minute or so (and also held down the power button for a few seconds to drain any residual power), then put the laptop through a full old-fashioned battery calibration process (charge to 100%, rest for 2 hours, drain to 0%, rest for 5 hours, charge to 100%). And it's worked!! Today I can use the laptop fine on battery power, and I've made sure to test the dGPU too and all's good there.

What I still don't know is what caused the initial booting problem that seemed to result in the drive being corrupt…

Anyway, two things to take away from this that'll maybe be useful to others:
  • Even though these non-removable batteries aren't supposed to require calibration (Apple have even removed the support article about how to calibrate batteries), calibration can still actually serve a useful purpose not just for third-party batteries but also OEM Apple ones too.
  • Something I haven't yet mentioned is that once or twice the laptop powered off randomly even when attached to the mains. This must be connected to the fact that Apple laptops throttle themselves when they have no battery attached, i.e. even when charging they depend on the battery for power. I thought that would be only under the highest-load scenarios but I wasn't doing anything intensive with the MBP, so it seems the dependence on battery power is a continuous thing regardless of load or charging state.
Click to expand...

At this point... this thing is on its last legs

Time to upgrade
 
I know it's tempting to think that, but I really don't think it is: until this week it's given me good, reliable service with no causes for concern (it hasn't been heavily used or abused). Perhaps it was some weird APFS glitch (or a faulty OWC SSD) that caused the original problem – then it looks like I was the one who caused the power/battery problem by doing too many SMC resets!

It's only a secondary computer for me anyway, so I do hope to be able to continue using it until it's almost literally falling to pieces. Well, either that, or the UK price for a >13" MBP drops down from the stratosphere…
 
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