Bad Logic Board?

[brinary001]

After trying to hunt down a cause for my MacBook Pro continuing to drain battery at an astonishing rate of 5-10% per hour (I'm talking lid closed, system idle) and sifting through every app and piece of software I run to see if it was continually running in the background despite the system being idle, and after an exhaustive test I haven't found anything to be consistent hog of power.

But...

Today I realized one of my USB-C ports went out. Can't charge with it or interface with it in any way (doesn't recognize drives, etc).

Could my battery drain be the cause of a faulty logic board? The two have to be correlated, no?

 

[maflynn]

Did you try a clean install of OS X? I'd try that first.

Of course if you have a malfunctioing USB-C port that does mean a component (or components) has failed on the logic board.

I'd take it into Apple to have them look at it, though they may first recommend a clean install of the OS, so do that first imo.

 

[brinary001]

Did you try a clean install of OS X? I'd try that first.

Of course if you have a malfunctioing USB-C port that does mean a component (or components) has failed on the logic board.

I'd take it into Apple to have them look at it, though they may first recommend a clean install of the OS, so do that first imo.

Now when you say “clean install” do you mean restore to factory conditions and gradually transfer my stuff back over, or do an exact imaging of the current state of the system and restore directly from that?

 

[maflynn]

Now when you say “clean install” do you mean restore to factory conditions and gradually transfer my stuff back over, or do an exact imaging of the current state of the system and restore directly from that?

Back up your data, reformat the drive and install OS X. I'd not restore anything and see if the issue continues. If you can live without restoring your data, keep it that way and send it into apple.

When I sent my laptop into Apple for a new battery, I wiped the drive, just to be sure my personal info was removed, but that's just me. Plus I had another computer to use

 

[flyinmac]

Communication ports are an interesting beast. Especially when you mix them with power.

It is hardware. But... it’s controlled by software. I have had USB ports suddenly “die” multiple times. No power, nothing. On both Macs and PC’s.

And it’s always turned out to be software.

I realize that on the surface, it seems like hardware either works or it doesn’t. But remember that this isn’t the traditional power plug of the old school.

Used to be either there was or wasn’t power. And anything that touched a source of power got a charge of it. Flow due to being in contact.

But, USB is an. Intelligent connection. Meaning it does what it’s told. Ok... maybe that’s a stupid connection. But you get my point.

There’s decision making as to what that ports function is. And software controls that. Granted some of that programming is in the hardware. But most of it is in software.

So it’s entirely possible that it could be a software problem.

If you don’t want to wipe your drive yet, I’d try 2 things. Boot to the recovery partition, and see what the port does.

I’d also perhaps go as far as doing a fresh install to an external drive if necessary. And boot from that fresh install. See what happens. You could do it to the internal drive if you aren’t worried about losing anything. But an external would work as a test without erasing your internal drive.

And of course I’d do the standard PRAM / NVRAM reset thing just because and who knows.

I just got a “dead” machine that only needed the reset. Simple... but fixes a lot of things.

 

[brinary001]

Update: I followed the steps outlined in this video:

It’s short but fairly technical in nature if anyone wants to have a look. Basically it just had me go deep into MacOS’s .plist files and change some of the power and energy functions’ Boolean values. I’m yet to see if this does the trick. That’s the thing about a problem like this, I can only track any progress or worsening behavior over time and not see immediately if a fix I implemented actually worked.

Even if this does fix my battery issue though, I’ll still have one usb-c port that’s bad..