I have a late 2011 MBP hooked to a Thunderbolt display. This afternoon I started getting white screen. It will be working fine and then I get white screen all of a sudden. I have to hold down the power button to shut it off and then restart it. It will work fine for about 30 minutes and then do it again. It has down it about 3 times in a down now, starting 1.5 hours ago. Any ideas? Could it be something with the ATD causing this? Thanks for any help.
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Macbook Pro getting a white screen
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This is still happening, but it quit for a few days, but now its back. I noticed that the external drive I put on for time machine and another for my movies are spooled up and nothing is accessing them. Don't know if that makes a difference. Any one with any suggestions? Thanks.
Sorry no one else has been able to chime in. Does the white screen come on in the middle of your work, or does it boot to a white screen? Have you reset the PRAM and SMC? It's hard to tell if its a software glitch or hardware fault. If it's a hardware fault, a replacement may be in order - hopefully something that Apple can diagnose for free, and something you can replace for less than what Apple would charge.
Ok - I was wondering because there seems to be posts (and some resolutions) out there regarding macbooks getting stuck at a white screen when booting up.
If it's happening in the middle of something, that would indicate it's not boot failure.
And you've probably already done this, but make sure the macbook firmware etc. is all up to date.
The infamous early+late-2011 MBP GPU failure strikes again.
Many 2011 Sandy Bridge MBP owners have reported GPU failures, with the symptoms that you described.
Just tested my ram with a program called Remember and it says I have bad ram. Anyone else think I'm on the right track? I upgraded my ram when I first got my pro from 4 to 8 gigs. I had one shipped to me bad from the get go. They immediately shipped a new one to me. I think I have Corsair. If I do indeed have a bad ram module, I will probably upgrade to 16 gigs. Who is a good company to go with? Thanks in advance.
Then I come across this last night. I have experienced a lot of what these folks are reporting.
https://discussions.apple.com/thread/2768351?start=0&tstart=0
https://discussions.apple.com/thread/2768351?start=0&tstart=0
For hard lockups like this and you are out of applecare I would clean, tint repaste the heatsinks with decent thermal paste for the GPU and CPU and clean all the fans out. Use a fan control app and laptop cooling pad to mitigate it happening again by keeping the core temps down.
Worst case scenario is a re-ball of the GPU to the logic board or a replacement, or if you are pretty handy technically you could mask off the logic board with tin foil leaving the GPU exposed and bake it in the oven at 200C for six minutes precisely with a couple of coins on top of the GPU to reflow the solder!
But I would try and be patient and do just the clean and repaste, Apple service centres a few months ago are reporting a spike in the numbers of 2011 MBP with ATI GPU failures and there may be a chance of a free exchange program in the pipeline..
Worst case scenario is a re-ball of the GPU to the logic board or a replacement, or if you are pretty handy technically you could mask off the logic board with tin foil leaving the GPU exposed and bake it in the oven at 200C for six minutes precisely with a couple of coins on top of the GPU to reflow the solder!
But I would try and be patient and do just the clean and repaste, Apple service centres a few months ago are reporting a spike in the numbers of 2011 MBP with ATI GPU failures and there may be a chance of a free exchange program in the pipeline..
Thanks for the heads up Gav. I will try to hold out, it hasn't messed up today. I chatted with someone from Crucial yesterday and told him about the fault I got when I ran the apple hardware test. He seems to think it could be a ram going bad. Just because the fault had "MEM' in it. Wish I could find out exactly what that fault was.
Well, I talked with Crucial. They are going to replace my RAM under warranty. I put my original 4 GB of ram back in the computer and ran the Apple Hardware Test again and everything tested OK. So hopefully that was it. I tried to get them to let me upgrade to 16 gigs but they said I had to do a direct replacement. Which is fine, they're customer service has been superb so far.
Well, I believe my new seagate back up plus hard drives are the issue. I have had them unplugged for a few days with to lock ups. They were brand new and I reformatted them using disk utility to mac os journaled. That seems like a big waste of money!
Still fighting this issue. Now I'm thinking its my logic board. Took it to the Genius Bar and they did some things. They said it could be my Logitech Keyboard and mouse causing the issue, because the Solar app was crashing hundreds of time a minute. I replaced all Logitech peripherals with apple stuff and still the issue persists. They said if I try that and it still happens it could be the logic board. The only time it crashes is if it is plugged up to my TBD. Here is a screen shot of the last crash, its over my head so maybe you all can see something I can't. Thanks.
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