Macbook Pro 17 (2011) not booting, trying to narrow down the cause

[JohnMcL7]

My sister has a 2011 Macbook Pro 17 which isn't able to complete the boot sequence with it initially powering on, playing the Apple start up noise then displaying an Apple logo and progress bar reaching around three quarters of the bar before showing a grey screen then powering off. I've had a look around and it seems possible it's either an SSD failure or a graphics card failure so I've been trying to narrow it down, the challenge is the machine is a few hundred miles from me and I'll only have a short amount of time to look at it when I happen to be passing later this week. I have very limited experience with Apple devices as I don't support them nor ever use them myself.

I asked her to run the File System Consistency Check (cmd+s) and noticed a number of references to drive problems, after the line 'Got boot device' it shows:

'Untitled 2@2/ApBSD root: disk1s1, major 1, minor 6
disk1s1: device is not readable
hfs_mountfs: buf_meta_bread failed with 13
hfs_mount: hfs_mountfs returned error=13 for device unknown-dev
hfs_mountroot failed 13

From what I've found of other examples of this being executed there should be a line saying 'The volume xx appears to be OK' but I couldn't see that here and as I understand the disk layout, disk1s1 is the main boot drive. I've been looking up these errors which return results for problems resulting from upgrades to High Sierra so I'm not sure this is a slam dunk showing it's a drive failure although I can see it could be different symptoms for the same error. Setting the system to manual startup it shows the drive but when selected it shows the same symptoms as a normal failed boot.

I managed to get her to run the Apple diagnostics expecting it would be able to flag the faulty drive but it passed with no issue. I've asked her if she's ever seen any distorted colour on the screen that would strongly suggest a GPU failure but she's not seen anything like that, during some of the testing with it (I lost track of the different startup options I was asking her to test) it did occasionally stop on a bright solid blue screen.

Are there any other easy tests I could ask my sister to do to pinpoint the problem? It looks to me it's likely it's a drive failure but I'd like to be more certain as I'll need to order an SSD in advance and I'll have limited time with the machine. Am I correct in thinking to build the OS on the new drive I'll need a suitable screwdriver head and a USB drive to put the OS onto (there's another High Sierra machine available which should be able to easily build the stick)?

Thanks for any pointers.

 

[Fishrrman]

If not RadeonGate, it could be a failing hard drive.

Will it boot into "safe mode"?
(start up holding down the shift key)

 

[chrfr]

My sister has a 2011 Macbook Pro 17 which isn't able to complete the boot sequence with it initially powering on, playing the Apple start up noise then displaying an Apple logo and progress bar reaching around three quarters of the bar before showing a grey screen then powering off.

I'd change the disk cable first. They're inexpensive and easy to swap, and all the unibody Mac portables can have issues with them.

 

[JohnMcL7]

If not RadeonGate, it could be a failing hard drive.

Will it boot into "safe mode"?
(start up holding down the shift key)

I don't think so, I've asked her to try and report back to me.

I'd change the disk cable first. They're inexpensive and easy to swap, and all the unibody Mac portables can have issues with them.

Thanks for the suggestion as that's not one I'd come across, what are the typical symptoms with a cable failure?

 

[chrfr]

Thanks for the suggestion as that's not one I'd come across, what are the typical symptoms with a cable failure?

It's pretty much what you're seeing- erratic disk performance, mostly. Problems seem to be most common with the 2012 13", but I've had problems with the cable on a 2010 as well.

 

[G5isAlive]

If it’s a disk issue on a machine that old you should be able to set up an external boot disk to see if that works…if so then replace internal cable/disk

 

[JohnMcL7]

I've managed to get a hold of the Macbook and been working on it this evening.

Safe mode doesn't seem to do anything different, I've also tried safe mode with verbose output but even going through frames on a recorded video I can't make it out. It reaches a grey screen and does nothing further.

I've removed the internal drive and booting as a USB drive using a USB to SATA converter but no change and then fitted a spare 1TB hard drive (I couldn't find a spare SSD) and tried booting it with a USB Sierra installer which I've built one of these from before. It showed the Sierra installer ok but when I choose it I get the Apple logo and a progress bar before it goes to a grey screen, the fans go to full and then it stays there and doesn't appear to do anything more. I gave it ten minutes or so but the rise in fan noise suggested to me it's not good.

I connected the Macbook SSD via an adapter to a virtual OSX install on a Windows machine although it wasn't showing, I installed APFS for Windows from Paragon on the Windows laptop and it's seeing the SSD files fine. The directory structure looks good and a couple of files I've opened have worked, I haven't bulk transferred any files yet as it's taking forever and a day but the drive does look ok.

I've not seen any sign of any weird graphics glitches or similar that would indicate a GPU fault but it looks like there is some hardware fault here?

 

[jordanfc21]

I've managed to get a hold of the Macbook and been working on it this evening.

Safe mode doesn't seem to do anything different, I've also tried safe mode with verbose output but even going through frames on a recorded video I can't make it out. It reaches a grey screen and does nothing further.

I've removed the internal drive and booting as a USB drive using a USB to SATA converter but no change and then fitted a spare 1TB hard drive (I couldn't find a spare SSD) and tried booting it with a USB Sierra installer which I've built one of these from before. It showed the Sierra installer ok but when I choose it I get the Apple logo and a progress bar before it goes to a grey screen, the fans go to full and then it stays there and doesn't appear to do anything more. I gave it ten minutes or so but the rise in fan noise suggested to me it's not good.

I connected the Macbook SSD via an adapter to a virtual OSX install on a Windows machine although it wasn't showing, I installed APFS for Windows from Paragon on the Windows laptop and it's seeing the SSD files fine. The directory structure looks good and a couple of files I've opened have worked, I haven't bulk transferred any files yet as it's taking forever and a day but the drive does look ok.

I've not seen any sign of any weird graphics glitches or similar that would indicate a GPU fault but it looks like there is some hardware fault here?

Sounds to me like a graphics card issue. If you're not able to get further than the boot screen with the progress bar, you may not notice the graphical issues as there's only two shades of gray to render (compared to the many colors once actually booted up). This was an issue I had where my boot screen looked completely normal and wasn't until the OS had loaded completely that I could notice the issues. I'd recommend trying to disable the dGPU through these steps and see if you're then able to boot into macOS: https://gist.github.com/cdleon/d1eff7246a25193304284ecec40445b0

Good luck!

 

[JohnMcL7]

I found a second hand model of the same type with less ram and a hard drive plus a two year warranty so I ordered that and swapped over the SSD and ram to the new Macbook and it's working fine. I put the ram and HD into the original Macbook and it failed exactly the same way so it seems it's definitely the GPU or something on the motherboard.