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macbook pro weird problem

S

surfturf

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Jul 30, 2015
6
0
hi all, new to this forum!

so i currently have 15" mbp i think either 09/10 model (the aluminum one) and so far it's served me great. so yesterday, when i was using it, out of the blue it just suddenly froze, unresponsive and all that scary stuff. i turned it off and turned it back on. however in the process of turning it on, it was stuck in the gray screen area with the apple logo. i tried every possible solution (cmd r and all that), and none was working. i took it to a professional repair and he tried everything i did, then he finally said that it was a hardware failure and that i was better off buying a new laptop instead of spending alot of money on repairing it.
so i did. i bought a new mbp.
i got home in the middle of the night, somehow carrying a glitter of hope that my old mac would work again. then, bam! i turned it on, and it turned on as if nothing happened. i backed up, i did the disk utility repair and it was fixed.
so now...... what do i do? i still have the new mbp unopened, and all the while i'm not a 100% sure what's going to happen to my current mbp. is it going to give out again, or what?
do i sell my current mbp and use the new one, or return the new one and use my current mbp?
help :(:(:(:(
 
Personally, once I have the new laptop in hand, you would have to pry it from my cold dead hands. So I would either sell the old one, keep it around as I hate to get rid of my machines for some reason, or better yet pass it along to a friend family member or kid free of charge.

If you are confident that the old machine's issue was just an HDD hiccup, and the machine is still up to the task for your work, then you can put in a new SSD and extend its useful life. Put the old HDD in a USB3/SATA3 enclosure and use it to store noncritical data. The SSD can then be moved to the enclosure after you finally give up on the old machine in the future and run at essentially full speed. Keep in mind that you could find yourself buying a new machine again tomorrow, or 5 years down the line. You just never know.
 
meson said:
Personally, once I have the new laptop in hand, you would have to pry it from my cold dead hands. So I would either sell the old one, keep it around as I hate to get rid of my machines for some reason, or better yet pass it along to a friend family member or kid free of charge.

If you are confident that the old machine's issue was just an HDD hiccup, and the machine is still up to the task for your work, then you can put in a new SSD and extend its useful life. Put the old HDD in a USB3/SATA3 enclosure and use it to store noncritical data. The SSD can then be moved to the enclosure after you finally give up on the old machine in the future and run at essentially full speed. Keep in mind that you could find yourself buying a new machine again tomorrow, or 5 years down the line. You just never know.
Click to expand...

but that's the thing. i don't know what the issue was. it did act very strange, considering that it wasn't responsive when slapped with all kind of solutions, then the next day it acted like nothing happened. even the professional repair guy said it was a hardware failure.
i dont know what to do, and im just happy that at this point i decided to not recycle my old mac (i was close to doing it after i bought the new mac but something told me not to)
 
BrianBaughn said:
Did you get any details on what the repair shop guy said about the "hardware failure"?
Click to expand...

he just said that it was bound to happen in older computer (5+years) and that it will be hard to fix. he even did the diagnosis with the ethernet cable but everything he did wasn't working. all the while his ugly supervisor just stood there with his ugly smug face without even offering any advice
 
surfturf said:
...turned it back on. however in the process of turning it on, it was stuck in the gray screen area with the apple logo.
Click to expand...
I would like you to be more specific. What do you mean stuck? Was there any animation displayed? How long did you leave it alone before deciding it was stuck? What did you do then? What operating system is on this machine? Did you try booting to the recovery partition? Did you try booting to internet recovery? Did you try booting from an external drive? Details matter.
 
I wouldn't be able to sell that machine in good conscience, but as you said there is no way of knowing whether the issue is in the logic board, the HDD, or possibly the SATA cable between the logic board and the HDD. Those cables are extremely thin and if the insulation gets broken or rubbed off it can intermittently short to the case giving issues ranging from beach balling to intermittent connectivity like you are having.

I think at this point it's probably best to keep the new machine and put it to use. You will always be left worrying about the old machine. And if you give away the old one, tell the person what happened and that the machine could fail at any time. If I didn't run my machines until they die, I'd probably keep around an old laptop for a media center.
 
chabig said:
I would like you to be more specific. What do you mean stuck? Was there any animation displayed? How long did you leave it alone before deciding it was stuck? What did you do then? What operating system is on this machine? Did you try booting to the recovery partition? Did you try booting to internet recovery? Did you try booting from an external drive? Details matter.
Click to expand...

my old mac has the latest os x.
by stuck i mean, every time when i try to turn it on, a grey screen would appear then after a while the apple logo would show up with the progress bar underneath it. the bar would move very slowly, until about halfway then my mac would shut itself down, and it kept happening every time i tried to turn it on. this happened for the whole day yesterday, and i kept turning it on and off and tried all the combination keys hoping for something to happen. cmd r didn't work, holding down cmd didn't work, cmd shift whatever also didn't work.
Did you try booting to the recovery partition? Did you try booting to internet recovery? Did you try booting from an external drive?
Click to expand...
that's what the shop repair guy did, and nothing worked.

now as i'm typing from my old mac, everything seemed fine, smooth, no lagginess and just fine. i'm so confused and kind of worried to be honest.
i would hate for this to be that brief period of calmness before the storm.. you know like how people before their death, they get this brief period of perfect health ..until it hits them?
 
surfturf said:
he just said that it was bound to happen in older computer (5+years) and that it will be hard to fix. he even did the diagnosis with the ethernet cable but everything he did wasn't working. all the while his ugly supervisor just stood there with his ugly smug face without even offering any advice
Click to expand...

Sounds like an ugly place to be.

Anyway, I'd keep the new one. Last thing you want is to get comfortable with the old one again, and then it crashes for good, and you loose photos/docs/etc. you really care about.
 
I apologize that it took this long for me to respond to my own thread.
Anyways, I decided to get a new mbp ((2012?2013?model)the one with disc drive)).
My old Mac was acting very strange, the night after I took it to the repair shop and the guy had made an ugly verdict for my mac, I decided to give it one more try. Much to my surprise, I turned it on and it worked like normal. Like nothing happened. It was running smooth and fine. Me being cautious, decided to not do anything crazy, but I attempted many repairs on it to make sure that everything is fixed. The fix seemed to make it better, and I continued to use it all night long.
Then, BAM, it froze out of the blue and couldn't be restarted or anything. That's when I instinctively knew that my mac had passed away. The last moment I spent with him before he passed away was something I'd never forget. It was so surreal. How can a machine act like a human body, so to speak, even experience the calm and tranquil moment before death. I had to let him go, this time for good. I'm glad I was able to spend his last moments with me, and saying goodbye to each other properly.
Now, I put him to rest in his graveyard (back to his original box in my closet lol), and maybe when I'm ready I will sell him for parts. RIP Timmothy, you have done well by me.


So the next day I went ahead and opened the new MBP I had purchased. Much to my horror, when I opened it, one of the keys in the keyboard were crooked and hanging loose!! Enraged, I stormed back to the store and demanded a new ones and they were nice enough to give me another new MBP.
So I had been using my new MBP, but it seems to be acting up here and there. The wifi would drop suddenly and I would have to manually reconnect it; which gets pretty annoying.

I miss my old Mac, Timmothy, SOOOOO bad! can someone revive him? :(((
 
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