Today I carried out some long overdue maintenance on my Mid-2012 13" MacBook Pro (non-retina). Gheez that was a mouth full.
I've stripped the machine down to the point where I was able to remove the logic board then used compressed air to clear the heatsink fins and the MacBook chassis of any dust; removed the CPU heatsink and replaced the dry, crumbling thermal paste then reassembled the machine.
When I attempted to boot the machine, I was greeted with those three beeps (these ones) which prompted me to remove and reseat the RAM. This didn't help, so I removed both sticks and tried again with 1 stick in the topmost slot — still nothing! I gathered that that stick might had died during the removal/reinsertion of the logic board so I tried the left over RAM stick and was greeted by the same three beeps. I then tested the same two ram sticks in the bottom-most RAM slot and my MacBook Pro booted up both times. This leads me to believe that the RAM sticks are fine, but the RAM slot is dead.
To fix this, would I need to replace the entire logic board with a known good one? Are there any other methods anyone here can think of to try to kick the RAM slot back into action? I have checked for debris in the ram slot (possible contamination from the compressed air blowing) but the slot is empty.
On the bright side of today's escapade, my 2012 MacBook Pro (which I'm writing this post on now) is running cooler than ever, albeit with single-channel memory. Luckily, I have been running 16GB in this machine for a long while (2 x 8GB) so I'm not missing out on too much knowing that I've had to go down to 8GB for the time being.
Finally, thanks in advance for any help, tricks or suggestions leading to some sort of fix.
I've stripped the machine down to the point where I was able to remove the logic board then used compressed air to clear the heatsink fins and the MacBook chassis of any dust; removed the CPU heatsink and replaced the dry, crumbling thermal paste then reassembled the machine.
When I attempted to boot the machine, I was greeted with those three beeps (these ones) which prompted me to remove and reseat the RAM. This didn't help, so I removed both sticks and tried again with 1 stick in the topmost slot — still nothing! I gathered that that stick might had died during the removal/reinsertion of the logic board so I tried the left over RAM stick and was greeted by the same three beeps. I then tested the same two ram sticks in the bottom-most RAM slot and my MacBook Pro booted up both times. This leads me to believe that the RAM sticks are fine, but the RAM slot is dead.
To fix this, would I need to replace the entire logic board with a known good one? Are there any other methods anyone here can think of to try to kick the RAM slot back into action? I have checked for debris in the ram slot (possible contamination from the compressed air blowing) but the slot is empty.
On the bright side of today's escapade, my 2012 MacBook Pro (which I'm writing this post on now) is running cooler than ever, albeit with single-channel memory. Luckily, I have been running 16GB in this machine for a long while (2 x 8GB) so I'm not missing out on too much knowing that I've had to go down to 8GB for the time being.
Finally, thanks in advance for any help, tricks or suggestions leading to some sort of fix.
