2008 Macbook Pro, Black Screen

[tripmusic]

2008 MacBook Pro (4,1) 2.4 C2D powers on with black screen. Already had a MB replacement some years ago and hardly see's much usage for some years now.

Observations...

No chime, but my sound was muted upon last successful boot
Power light stays solid and dim
Won't boot into TDM
Won't boot from machine system disks
Can't run AHT
CD won't eject now
Safe mode doesn't work
PRAM/SMC reset

Before this happened I had just finished transferring files from a TM backup after a fresh El Cap install. The machine could've been getting hot because the keyboard illumination was on full-blast for a while before I realized it. Also SMC Fan Control was active with slow fan settings, so it was getting hot. These settings came from a Mac Pro and I always forget to trash prefs, etc after a migration to the laptop. The CPU only showed 70C, so not that hot.

The last last thing I did was run a sudo command before restarting and then the black screen appeared. The migration was from a MP using two drives, one OS and the other media, using terminal to soft link the directories to the media drive. I only have one drive in the laptop, so directories were just whited out. So I sudo rm'd the directories. I was just about to copy the folders and files I wanted and then it happened.

I'm thinking the terminal lines I entered are just pure coincidence and have nothing to do with this. Fried motherboard...again? Dead MB's won't power on at all. So fried 8600m GT? If so, can you solder a new chip in?

 

[tripmusic]

SOLVED... for the time being

Took the motherboard out and reflowed the GPU with a hair dryer, tapped on it's edges lightly and voila! Screen was back on. After reading quite a bit on the subject, this trick may or may not be permanent, as the GPU chip itself may just be screwed up inside inside and have nothing to do with the balls and contacts. It is unclear whether the heating up of the chip is fixing something inside of it, or the balls and contacts

I did forget to connect a ground wire to the board and the fans were full blast. I was checking the temps, trying to see what was happening. I think the cpu temp got up to 130C!!! Yikes. It was only for a minute or so. Hope it's ok. Fix one thing, screw up another.

Even, prior to the display farting out, my idle temps were around 55C, which seemed a little high compared to other users and after cleaning and applying thermal paste it remains the same. Did a quick stress test and cpu/gpu were staying around 70-80C with 2500rpm fans

This MBP is basically just a back-up machine nowadays, but I always liked the all silver look and matte screen better than the unibody's. If this fails again, or I find a good deal, I may just swap out the board for a 2.6Ghz with larger cache and 512MB GPU