Ok so here's one that I have searched for a week straight and still not found anything helpful. Here goes.
I bought my first Macbook in May of 2009. It's one of the late 2008 unibody models, 13.3 inch 2.4 GHz intel and 8gigs RAM, and it came running OS 10.6.3. It worked wonderfully for over three years without one memorable complaint and I am a heavy user of photoshop, iMovie, dreamweaver and many other CPU intensive programs. Plus I can spend 3-8 hrs straight on my Mac working it to its limits for sure. Anyhow, one day I woke up and it wouldn't boot up. Now I'm no stranger to opening things up and having a look for myself. So far, I've replaced the optical drive (for making funny noises like it was dying, previous to this crash), I've replaced the already upgraded hard disk from 250gigs to 500gigs, I replaced the RAM twice, first to upgrade to 8gigs and then back down to 4gigs because I had brand new RAM chips and think I static shorted my 8gig ones playing around with the guts of my Macbook one day. I've taken the logic board out to be thoroughly cleaned, and I replaced the battery with one of the new ones about 7 months ago.
It was about 2 months ago when it just stopped booting up, and it's a weird story how it started happening. One night I was working away as usual, the next morning it would only boot up to the Apple logo and think about stuff for about 1-2 mins and then it'd shut itself down. I didn't mess much with it at the time other than try other chargers and booting from the Snow Leopard disk I own, but that didn't help any. Now I'm really putting my time into fixing it again. Half the time it doesn't do anything at all when the power button is pushed, the other half of the time it will let me option boot and select the recovery-flash-drive I made out of my Snow Leopard disk and then it starts to let me re-install the OS on the empty 500gig hard disk, but it dies everytime about 45 seconds into the install process. I've tried a custom install to strip down all the stuff I wouldn't need and drastically shorten the install time, but the same thing happens everytime. I've tried booting in safe mode, verbose mode, I zapped the PRAM, I've tried to use the optical drive but it's not being recognized for some weird reason (even though it accepted my disk and makes the normal noises it always does during boot up), and I tried running a hardware test from the recovery-flashdrive I made, but it doesn't do anything when I try that other than shut off like it does in the middle of the OS install. I'm really at my wits end over this now at this point. Recently I read something about people having weird issues with their power adapter having a very dim glow, which I also have about half the time when I plug it in, and that led me to read up a little on the distribution of power from the power board to the rest of the parts inside, but I can't decide if that's my issue or not. I don't really feel like my symptoms match that of a bad power board, but that's why I'm here, to see if anyone's experienced similar issues and was able to fix it. Please help!
I bought my first Macbook in May of 2009. It's one of the late 2008 unibody models, 13.3 inch 2.4 GHz intel and 8gigs RAM, and it came running OS 10.6.3. It worked wonderfully for over three years without one memorable complaint and I am a heavy user of photoshop, iMovie, dreamweaver and many other CPU intensive programs. Plus I can spend 3-8 hrs straight on my Mac working it to its limits for sure. Anyhow, one day I woke up and it wouldn't boot up. Now I'm no stranger to opening things up and having a look for myself. So far, I've replaced the optical drive (for making funny noises like it was dying, previous to this crash), I've replaced the already upgraded hard disk from 250gigs to 500gigs, I replaced the RAM twice, first to upgrade to 8gigs and then back down to 4gigs because I had brand new RAM chips and think I static shorted my 8gig ones playing around with the guts of my Macbook one day. I've taken the logic board out to be thoroughly cleaned, and I replaced the battery with one of the new ones about 7 months ago.
It was about 2 months ago when it just stopped booting up, and it's a weird story how it started happening. One night I was working away as usual, the next morning it would only boot up to the Apple logo and think about stuff for about 1-2 mins and then it'd shut itself down. I didn't mess much with it at the time other than try other chargers and booting from the Snow Leopard disk I own, but that didn't help any. Now I'm really putting my time into fixing it again. Half the time it doesn't do anything at all when the power button is pushed, the other half of the time it will let me option boot and select the recovery-flash-drive I made out of my Snow Leopard disk and then it starts to let me re-install the OS on the empty 500gig hard disk, but it dies everytime about 45 seconds into the install process. I've tried a custom install to strip down all the stuff I wouldn't need and drastically shorten the install time, but the same thing happens everytime. I've tried booting in safe mode, verbose mode, I zapped the PRAM, I've tried to use the optical drive but it's not being recognized for some weird reason (even though it accepted my disk and makes the normal noises it always does during boot up), and I tried running a hardware test from the recovery-flashdrive I made, but it doesn't do anything when I try that other than shut off like it does in the middle of the OS install. I'm really at my wits end over this now at this point. Recently I read something about people having weird issues with their power adapter having a very dim glow, which I also have about half the time when I plug it in, and that led me to read up a little on the distribution of power from the power board to the rest of the parts inside, but I can't decide if that's my issue or not. I don't really feel like my symptoms match that of a bad power board, but that's why I'm here, to see if anyone's experienced similar issues and was able to fix it. Please help!
