MacBook5,2 [Early '09] - Force reset of SMC?

[user1690]

Hi all!

I've come into ownership of a MacBook5,2 , the Early '09 model (2GHz Core 2 Duo, 667MHz RAM etc...). However it seems to have an issue charging the battery and the fans are on full blast all the time.

I'm led to believe that this is an SMC issue? SMC is responsible for power management of Macs as far as im aware so im looking to reset the SMC on this unit. The unit does boot and work normally apart from these issues. In Mac OS it reports BATTERY NOT CHARGING as well.
Currently its running El Capitan.

Following Apple's instructions of remove battery + hold power for 5s doesnt seem to be working so i've been trying to find other ways to perhaps force-reset the SMC.

One such method i've come across is to use rEFIt, coupled with a smcflasher.efi file and the k36b.smc file (which are both extracted from SMC Update 1.3 from Apple). However when i try, i get the following:

smcflasher -reset 1
ERROR: Invalid option 2 '1'
SmcUtil Ver '1.1.12' usage
Status error 0x80000000000000002

If i try to force-update the SMC, hoping that may trigger a reset by default i get:
smcflasher -force -loadApp k36b.smc -norestart
File parsed successfully! 44 Hash, 1 Security, 1408 Data Lines
ERROR: IsValidConfig 0x8000000000000003Status error 0x8000000000000003

Any assistance would be greatly appreciated here

 

[rampancy]

A couple of questions:

1) Have you tested your battery on another A1181 MacBook? What does System Information or CoconutBattery say about it? Given the age of your machine it's very likely that the battery is either dying or close to dead.

2) Do you how hot your MacBook is running? If a fan/temp utility like SMCFanControl reports consistently high temperatures (e.g. >=80 degress idle) then you may need to apply new thermal paste to the CPU/GPU. It was common for the early Intel MacBooks and MacBook Pros to be shipped with cheap thermal paste applied at inapporpriately high amounts.