Dropped Macbook... What's wrong?

[war eagle]

Well, over the weekend the unfortunate happened and I tripped on the edge of the couch and dropped my Late '08 Unibody MacBook. Now it wont power up. I hit the power button and the hard drive spins for a few seconds, nothing comes up on screen and then it just shuts off a few seconds later.

What do you guys think it may be? Logic board or something?


Also a few times after I powered it up I would hear some beeps. I want to say it was about 3 of them but im not sure. Also the white light for the hard drive pulses when I cut it on until it shuts off.

And I know I posted this in the MacBook section but this section gets more traffic and my computer is pretty much the same as the 13' MBP.

 

[Jaro65]

Why not just take it to an Apple Store and let them run diagnostics on it? You don't need to get it fixed there if you don't want to, but at least you'll know exactly what's wrong with it.

 

[war eagle]

Why not just take it to an Apple Store and let them run diagnostics on it? You don't need to get it fixed there if you don't want to, but at least you'll know exactly what's wrong with it.

I'm at university. Apple store is about 175 miles away and I have 3 jobs so it's hard to just go up there to see what's wrong. Classes are starting soon too.

 

[eawmp1]

What do you guys think it may be? Logic board or something?

Nothing good...and nothing we can diagnose here. Make arrangements to have it shipped to a service center.

 

[aethelbert]

While I'm not for certain what the beeps mean, it's possible that the RAM may have come unseated. That's one of the few things that will completely prevent a boot sequence from being attempted provided that the system is accepting power (which it is).

I wouldn't put too much money on that, but it's at least worth a check.

 

[MacModMachine]

Well, over the weekend the unfortunate happened and I tripped on the edge of the couch and dropped my Late '08 Unibody MacBook. Now it wont power up. I hit the power button and the hard drive spins for a few seconds, nothing comes up on screen and then it just shuts off a few seconds later.

What do you guys think it may be? Logic board or something?


Also a few times after I powered it up I would hear some beeps. I want to say it was about 3 of them but im not sure. Also the white light for the hard drive pulses when I cut it on until it shuts off.

And I know I posted this in the MacBook section but this section gets more traffic and my computer is pretty much the same as the 13' MBP.

take out the ram and harddrive, re insert a stick of ram and try it.

dont take one out an leave the other, pull them both a put one back it so its reseated.

try that, ram usually unseats itself when dropped.

 

[war eagle]

So taking it to the apple store or whatever how much time am I looking at spending there for this diagnostic?

 

[Pax]

Reseat the RAM

3 beeps usually mean bad ram (http://support.apple.com/kb/HT2341?viewlocale=en_US)

switch computer off, take off the back, pull out the RAM sticks and push them back in. The Apple site should give you detailed information how to do this.

If you're not confident to do this yourself, take it to a computer tech. For something straightforward like this it won't need to be an Apple specialist. It will be a two minute job. I expect most places won't even charge you for their time to do this.

Hopefully that is all that is wrong.

 

[almostinsane]

I had this exact same issue happen 2 weeks ago (I didn't drop mine, it just stopped booting but the HD would spin for a second or two). I'm out of warranty but bought it with an AMEX and they double the Apple warranty. Send it off to AMEX a week ago and waiting to hear back.