Hi all, new to the forums here, and in need of some serious assistance with my Early 2011, 15-inch MacBook Pro running OS X Yosemite.
Some background: I am one of the many unfortunate owners of Early 2011 MBP owners experiencing usage issues as a result of GPU failures. For the past few months the ability to use my machine normally has slowly deteriorated, to the point where opening websites with embedded video or using GPU intensive applications would consistently cause my computer to crash. Upon attempting to reboot after a crash, my machine's display would look fragmented with horizontal green lines going across it, the progress bar would load midway through, the screen turned white, the computer would shut off, and then restart itself, displaying the same broken green lines. Through trial-and-error, I discovered that if I let this restart loop continue over the course of a day and then do a hard power-down afterwards, attempting to power it on the next morning would turn my machine on.
To add to the problem, this seems to be the only way to get my machine to turn on after crashing. Booting into the recovery disk causes the screen to turn blue with vertical black lines and then crash, Internet Recovery crashes after loading, as does attempting to load via the OS X Installation Disk.
Last night, however, after yet another crash, my attempt at rebooting did not cause the machine to restart-loop as it usually did. After using the Option key on boot to select a disk, my primary boot volume was renamed from "Macintosh HD" to "EFI Boot." From what I've read thus far - it seems that in order to get my machine (somewhat) working again, that I would need to re-partition and reformat the disk and perform a clean install of OS X. The problem is, as I've mentioned earlier, is that I can't run the system in Recovery Mode to use Disk Utility and re-partition my hard disk. I do have another MacBook in the household and a Firewire cable to read the disk, but I'm not sure if I could re-partition it using the working machine's Disk Utility.
So... does anyone have any advice? Being out of the warranty period, I've been reluctant thus far to take my machine to the Genius Bar after hearing that even though Apple has been made aware of issues with the Early and Late 2011 models that owners had been asked to pay hundreds of dollars out-of-pocket to pay to replace the logic board, some of whom reporting that the fix lasted merely a month or so. This is my last ditch effort to salvage what I can of my laptop or at the very least, perform a secure wipe on the drive so I can ditch it and sell it for parts.
Thanks to anyone that took the time to read this, your advice (or condolences) are appreciated, haha.
Some background: I am one of the many unfortunate owners of Early 2011 MBP owners experiencing usage issues as a result of GPU failures. For the past few months the ability to use my machine normally has slowly deteriorated, to the point where opening websites with embedded video or using GPU intensive applications would consistently cause my computer to crash. Upon attempting to reboot after a crash, my machine's display would look fragmented with horizontal green lines going across it, the progress bar would load midway through, the screen turned white, the computer would shut off, and then restart itself, displaying the same broken green lines. Through trial-and-error, I discovered that if I let this restart loop continue over the course of a day and then do a hard power-down afterwards, attempting to power it on the next morning would turn my machine on.
To add to the problem, this seems to be the only way to get my machine to turn on after crashing. Booting into the recovery disk causes the screen to turn blue with vertical black lines and then crash, Internet Recovery crashes after loading, as does attempting to load via the OS X Installation Disk.
Last night, however, after yet another crash, my attempt at rebooting did not cause the machine to restart-loop as it usually did. After using the Option key on boot to select a disk, my primary boot volume was renamed from "Macintosh HD" to "EFI Boot." From what I've read thus far - it seems that in order to get my machine (somewhat) working again, that I would need to re-partition and reformat the disk and perform a clean install of OS X. The problem is, as I've mentioned earlier, is that I can't run the system in Recovery Mode to use Disk Utility and re-partition my hard disk. I do have another MacBook in the household and a Firewire cable to read the disk, but I'm not sure if I could re-partition it using the working machine's Disk Utility.
So... does anyone have any advice? Being out of the warranty period, I've been reluctant thus far to take my machine to the Genius Bar after hearing that even though Apple has been made aware of issues with the Early and Late 2011 models that owners had been asked to pay hundreds of dollars out-of-pocket to pay to replace the logic board, some of whom reporting that the fix lasted merely a month or so. This is my last ditch effort to salvage what I can of my laptop or at the very least, perform a secure wipe on the drive so I can ditch it and sell it for parts.
Thanks to anyone that took the time to read this, your advice (or condolences) are appreciated, haha.