MacBook stalls during power-on.

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Until a few weeks ago this MacBook has been working flawless on Snow Leopard. Over the past three weeks the OS stability seemed to start degrading. First an ocasional freeze of the desktop, then the boot procedure started taking longer.

Some days later the system would freeze 5 out of 10 times within the first 5 minutes after logon. Once past the first 5 minutes it would work fine for hours, unless I would let it go into sleep mode from which it wouldn't wake up again.

Now it's at a point where it won't boot up at all. The hard disk spins up and the white LED at the front is solid on, but after about 5 seconds the system powers off again leaving only the white front LED on.

When things weren't this bad yet I could work around the hangs by disconnecting power and battery and restart. This started taking more attempts over time to boot the system successfully.

This is all I've tried so far:

- disconnect battery and power, press power button for some seconds and retry.
- clear PRAM and NVRAM.
- press power button more than 4 seconds and retry.
- reseated memory modules.
- reformatted hard disk and installed Leopard.
- battery is 100% (has had about 40 charge cycles)
- checked all internal connectors. What I noticed here is that the speaker connector had a small crack which left one pin a bit loosely connected. Could that be IT?

Any other things which would be worth checking?

System specs:
MacBook 13"
Core2Duo 2.1MHz, 1GB RAM, Intel Graphics

Thanks,

GD

 

[mrsir2009]

I assume its still under Apple Care as its had only 40 cycles. Take it into the Apple store and see what they say.

Sounds like a failing HD maybe

 

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I assume its still under Apple Care as its had only 40 cycles. Take it into the Apple store and see what they say.

Sounds like a failing HD maybe

Thanks for your response. I've replaced the hard disk today and this didn't make a difference unfortunately. (I did follow the replacement with a PRAM/NVRAM clear, just in case...)

It's out of warranty since April and it has been repaired 4 months ago (liquid damage; replaced magsafe module, logic board and keyboard assy.)

 

[mrsir2009]

Do you have any hard disk you could use with it to see if it will boot from that? That could narrow down the problem to see if its the HD or not.

I'm not sure about this, but you might be able to try run it off an external firewire drive if you have one to see if the problem is the drive.

Good Luck!

 

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I don't have a firewire disk to boot off, but I've tried a different disk which gave the same result.

Not sure what OS was on the new disk, but one would expect to get at least past the black screen at this point, right?

 

[mrsir2009]

Yeah, try fiddling with HDs and OSs to see if you can get anywhere.