I am going to try to be as detailed as possible going through the troubleshooting I have already gone through.
A little background. I have a 2011 '15 Macbook Pro. About 3 or so years ago. I upgraded the hard drive with the OWC data doubler. Putting my existing hard drive in the old optical drive spot. And buying a 256GB Crucial 6Gb/s SSD. At the time the only issue I had was the right internal speaker stopped working, but I ignored it since I don't generally use the internal speakers anyway. The performance boost from booting off a SSD was worth the hassle. I have not really had any major problems with this computer up until this point. About two months ago I upgrade the ram from 4GB to 16GB. This went without issue.
Last week. I decided to upgrade to el Captain. I figured it had been out long enough to work out all the bugs. No issues with installing. A few days later while using it my screen started glytching (not sure how to really describe this). Almost like a wire was loose or something. Then the screen was off center. I saw a black bar down the right side and basically my screen was wrapped around from one end to the other (Images that should have been at the far left were moved so far that they ended up at the right side. Then the computer completely froze and I hard shutdowned. I tried rebooted a few times and it kept getting stuck at the load screen. Eventually it ended up loading. I don't remember exactly what I did. I figured it just over heated or something and called it a night, shut it down normally soon after and went to bed.
The next day I was using it again, and it was working fine. Some time later a very similar issue happened with the screen and it froze. When I tried rebooting it kept getting stuck at the load screen. There would be an Apple on the grey screen and the load bar would get to about 3/4 full and just stop.
At this point I tried rebooting and selecting the boot drive, resetting the PRAM, booting in safe mode... basically anything that comes up when googling my mac won't boot. Even something that involved me going into the terminal and resetting something. (I don't remember the exact steps, it was something specifically related to troubleshooting El Captain.)
All else had failed so I saw about reinstalling the OS. I tried doing internet re-install and it would load up the necessary files (downloading from the internet or what have you) then reboot and get stuck at a white screen. I have a thunderbolt HDD reader at work in a MacPro, so I hooked it up that, and re-installed the OS from there. I was able to boot via thunderbolt from my desktop. Worked no problem. But when I tried plugging it back into my desktop it didn't work, same problem I started with, it would get 3/4 of the way and freeze (mind you that generally I do not even see a load bar, it goes so quick it's practically instantaneous.) I tried removing my extra HDD just in case having it in was confusing the boot order somehow. I then tried from a co-workers laptop and it also booted with no problem.
At this point I had concluded:
• There is no issue with software
• There is no issue with my hard drive
At this point I didn't have time to keep working on it and a few days went by. I went back and tried the next thing I can actually change in my hardware and I went and switch back my old 4GB of RAM and tried to reboot it. Nothing. Not even a grey screen. I press power and the fans turn on but nothing on the screen. The power light blinks four or five times then stops. A few seconds later it will do that again. And I'll hold the power down until it turns off. I then put the 16GB of RAM back in and tried again. And the screen still wouldn't turn on.
At this point I am completely lost. I have always avoided going to the apple store since I can usually fix problems myself, but idk if it would be worth it for this since I am way out of warranty and even if I wasn't I had done so much modification that I feel like they wouldn't even help more at least charge me an arm a leg. I would rather try to get this fixed as apposed to dropping another $2k on a new laptop. If it costs me a few hundred that's fine, it's still worth it if it lasts me another 2 or 3 years. But if it's a motherboard or display issue how would I even replace that on a laptop like this?
Any help is greatly appreciated, sorry if this post is long winded I just figured I would try to preemptively answer and follow up questions as just saying my screen wasn't turning on would not be particularly helpful to finding a solution.
A little background. I have a 2011 '15 Macbook Pro. About 3 or so years ago. I upgraded the hard drive with the OWC data doubler. Putting my existing hard drive in the old optical drive spot. And buying a 256GB Crucial 6Gb/s SSD. At the time the only issue I had was the right internal speaker stopped working, but I ignored it since I don't generally use the internal speakers anyway. The performance boost from booting off a SSD was worth the hassle. I have not really had any major problems with this computer up until this point. About two months ago I upgrade the ram from 4GB to 16GB. This went without issue.
Last week. I decided to upgrade to el Captain. I figured it had been out long enough to work out all the bugs. No issues with installing. A few days later while using it my screen started glytching (not sure how to really describe this). Almost like a wire was loose or something. Then the screen was off center. I saw a black bar down the right side and basically my screen was wrapped around from one end to the other (Images that should have been at the far left were moved so far that they ended up at the right side. Then the computer completely froze and I hard shutdowned. I tried rebooted a few times and it kept getting stuck at the load screen. Eventually it ended up loading. I don't remember exactly what I did. I figured it just over heated or something and called it a night, shut it down normally soon after and went to bed.
The next day I was using it again, and it was working fine. Some time later a very similar issue happened with the screen and it froze. When I tried rebooting it kept getting stuck at the load screen. There would be an Apple on the grey screen and the load bar would get to about 3/4 full and just stop.
At this point I tried rebooting and selecting the boot drive, resetting the PRAM, booting in safe mode... basically anything that comes up when googling my mac won't boot. Even something that involved me going into the terminal and resetting something. (I don't remember the exact steps, it was something specifically related to troubleshooting El Captain.)
All else had failed so I saw about reinstalling the OS. I tried doing internet re-install and it would load up the necessary files (downloading from the internet or what have you) then reboot and get stuck at a white screen. I have a thunderbolt HDD reader at work in a MacPro, so I hooked it up that, and re-installed the OS from there. I was able to boot via thunderbolt from my desktop. Worked no problem. But when I tried plugging it back into my desktop it didn't work, same problem I started with, it would get 3/4 of the way and freeze (mind you that generally I do not even see a load bar, it goes so quick it's practically instantaneous.) I tried removing my extra HDD just in case having it in was confusing the boot order somehow. I then tried from a co-workers laptop and it also booted with no problem.
At this point I had concluded:
• There is no issue with software
• There is no issue with my hard drive
At this point I didn't have time to keep working on it and a few days went by. I went back and tried the next thing I can actually change in my hardware and I went and switch back my old 4GB of RAM and tried to reboot it. Nothing. Not even a grey screen. I press power and the fans turn on but nothing on the screen. The power light blinks four or five times then stops. A few seconds later it will do that again. And I'll hold the power down until it turns off. I then put the 16GB of RAM back in and tried again. And the screen still wouldn't turn on.
At this point I am completely lost. I have always avoided going to the apple store since I can usually fix problems myself, but idk if it would be worth it for this since I am way out of warranty and even if I wasn't I had done so much modification that I feel like they wouldn't even help more at least charge me an arm a leg. I would rather try to get this fixed as apposed to dropping another $2k on a new laptop. If it costs me a few hundred that's fine, it's still worth it if it lasts me another 2 or 3 years. But if it's a motherboard or display issue how would I even replace that on a laptop like this?
Any help is greatly appreciated, sorry if this post is long winded I just figured I would try to preemptively answer and follow up questions as just saying my screen wasn't turning on would not be particularly helpful to finding a solution.
