Help! MBpro won't boot.

[dan_mcd]

Hello MacRumors, you beautiful bunch of clever minds. My early 2011 MBpro died suddenly last night, now it turns on (blue light on the right hand side of the keyboard comes on) but the screen remains blank and doesn't get to the boot noise or boot. I am hoping to be able to pick the collective's brain and maybe ressurect my poor MBpro.

A bit of history, this is one of the MBpros affected by the AMD Radeon GPU failure. By the time mine failed, Apple had stopped the repair programme, making it economically insane to get it fixed properly. I disabled the faulty GPU using only the onboard GPU. This worked and installing a SSD made this a really quick machine which I was very happy with.

I have been noticing

recently ​

that the battery has been getting very hot and the fans have been kicking in whilst running low CPU intensive progammes. Last night I shut the lid, putting it to sleep, and when I came back the screen was blank and the fans were going crazy.

Things I have tried;

• Resetting the PRAM and NVRAM (although Im not sure that I tried the correct version for my mac)
• Resetting the SMC (as above bullet point as there are different versions)
• Hard cycling the power by unplugging the battery and then plugging it back in.
• Removing one stick of RAM at a time and trying to boot.
• Trying to boot from my old HDD which the SSD is a copy of.

All of the above resulted in the same non-booting MB pro with a blank screen.

Is there anything else that anybody can think of which I have missed? I would love to be able to fork out for a lovely new MBpro, but my two year old and another one on the way may have something to say about it! I really don't want to spend any money on buying a PC either.

This all feels pretty terminal, but any suggestions or different avenues to explore would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks for reading.

 

[TMRJIJ]

Sorry you are having this issue. Since this is a MacBook Pro issue, you won’t likely get help in the Site and Forum Feedback section of MacRumors.
I’m submitting a request to Moderators to move this thread to the proper section.

Best regards

 

[dan_mcd]

Doh! Many thanks.

 

[Fishrrman]

RadeonGate?
No longer worth fixing via a motherboard replacement.

Your best bets:
- PERMANENTLY DISABLE the discrete GPU via software (there are threads that discuss how to do that here)
or
- Start shopping for a replacement...

My opinion only.

 

[dan_mcd]

RadeonGate?
No longer worth fixing via a motherboard replacement.

Your best bets:
- PERMANENTLY DISABLE the discrete GPU via software (there are threads that discuss how to do that here)
or
- Start shopping for a replacement...

My opinion only.

Thanks, I will have a look at disabling the GPU and see what that yields and yes it is Radeongate! Either I am unlucky or they have a problem with their GPUs. Had an old EMac that did a very similar thing. The net result being a dead computer in bits, which seems to be the way this one is heading.