Late 2011 15" Won't Turn On

[mrmeister]

Hi there,

I have a Late 2011 15" i7 which as of today will not turn on. We've had an issue with the GPU in the past, but I was able to use advice from another post on here to boot into Linux, disable the GPU kexts and only run the Intel GPU. The caveat was that we couldn't let the battery die otherwise we'd have to go through this process again (we let it die once before accidentally).

Unfortunately, it's happened again, so I set aside some time to fix it, however I cannot get it to boot at all. It is now fully charged (plugged in for at least 4 hours, magsafe is green and the battery indicator LED is full), but when I hit the power button, the dvd drive does its usual sound, then the sleep indicator light stays solid and never reaches the chime. If I leave it long enough, I can hear the fans speeding up, but nothing else (macbook has an aftermarket SSD, so I cannot comment on any HDD sounds).

I'm unsure of what to do here. I have tried resetting PRAM, taking the computer apart and disconnecting the battery and holding the power button for 10 seconds, even reseating the RAM. The only time I saw something different was when I tried to boot with no RAM sticks installed. All I heard was a repeating warning bleep. I then tried adding 1 stick (tried both sticks in the same slot) and still no boot.

Does anyone have any extra advice? I'd love to get this working again. I was really hoping I could get another 6 months out of it and buy the 2nd gen/refreshed 16" MBP, only due to lack of money right now.

Thanks!

Edit: I'm definitely comfortable taking the macbook apart, should I need to. I just need to know what the next steps are as I've never had to go this far before. Is it still possible to salvage it with the existing parts, or will something definitely need replacing? If it's the logic board, it's probably not worth it... I'll just find a cheap used one to tie me over for a few more months.

 

[CoastalOR]

Can you boot from an external backup to help determine if it is the GPU again?

 

[mrmeister]

Can you boot from an external backup to help determine if it is the GPU again?

I'm unable to even get to the boot chime, so I can't even hold option to boot from a different drive. Same thing goes for recovery or safe mode. It just hangs on a black screen before the chime.

 

[CoastalOR]

I'm unable to even get to the boot chime, so I can't even hold option to boot from a different drive. Same thing goes for recovery or safe mode. It just hangs on a black screen before the chime.

It sounds like a hardware failure to me. I also had a mid 2011 MBP with the dGPU failure problems. Maybe you should have a Apple store test it.

 

[killerrobot]

My 2011 MBP does a similar thing where it shutdowns (kernal panic sometimes - having graphic card issues is my best guess)- and acts likes it's going to restart but for some reason just hangs with a blank screen. I've found this process to work about 1/5 times, but it eventually starts up and runs again until the next hiccup.

1. Hold power button to make sure the computer is shut down.
2. Make sure the computer is plugged in then reset the SMC (https://osxdaily.com/2010/03/24/when-and-how-to-reset-your-mac-system-management-controller-smc/)
3. Unplug the power cord as soon as the SMC reset starts (if battery is low, you see the light change from green to orange; if battery if full it just stays green).
4. Wait 5 seconds then plug the cord back in.
5. Close the lid
6. Unplug the power cord
7. Open the lid and start the computer.

I repeat this until the computer starts up. Sometimes it takes several attempts. I found a page that described this process years ago (I cannot remember the reason behind it but I equated it to the cmos battery not resetting properly but that doesn't exist in Macs...)

Hope this works for you. It's been keeping my 2011 running for years although, it's a frustrating process to deal with when it happens.

 

[vstop]

try this ,i fix my MacBook 2011 couple days ago,