Okay, I'm stumped - MBP doesn't boot anymore.

[CaptainChunk]

Two month old 15" MBP 2.6GHz.

This afternoon at work, I was saving a file in Excel '08. After a couple of seconds, the spinning color wheel appears. At this point, I wasn't ready to panic quite yet. But after a couple of minutes, the entire system locked up and I was forced to do a hard shutdown.

After I powered back on, there was no chime - just a blank gray screen that hangs. At that point, I was getting worried. The first thing that came to mind was resetting the PRAM. Okay, now the startup chime came back, but still a blank gray screen that goes nowhere. Ouch.

The next thing that came to mind was a bad hard disk (which is still a possibility). After I got home from work, I stuck the AppleCare Tech Tools disc in and tried to boot off it to run a diagnostic. No dice. The optical drive whirrs a bit, but the machine still doesn't get past the blank gray screen with no Apple logo. I've had bad hard disks before (it happens to the best of them) but at least I've been able to boot off the Tech Tools disc. The machine also won't boot into Target Disk Mode.

So, while the possibility of a bad hard disk remains, it seems like this could also be a bad logic board. I'm dropping the machine off to a mom and pop Mac store in town tomorrow morning (I'll NEVER go back to the Genius Bar for service). But being the dork I am, I'm frustrated that I have no clue what's going on with this machine.

Well, at least MOST of my data (everything but today's work, of course) is backed up to a separate external drive...

Any ideas?

 

[CaptainChunk]

Well, it's at service now - 72-hour diagnostics turnaround.

I must say that this is the first Apple notebook I've had that has already been to service being less than 6 months old...

 

[CaptainChunk]

Got a call this evening and it was a double whammy: logic board AND hard drive are dead. So I suppose something in the logic board fried the hard drive during a data write. Rats...

They sent it off for a logic board replacement and I'm told it should be back by Monday/Tuesday. I'm crossing my fingers...

 

[alphaod]

You have your HDD backed up?

 

[CaptainChunk]

Yes, everything was backed up except for the Excel file I was working on all the day the afternoon it crashed. I was saving it with the intention of copying it over to a jump drive but I didn't get that far, unfortunately.

Oh well. It could have been a LOT worse.

I'm likely going to get a replacement logic board with an allegedly faulty G86 GPU. I'm pretty sure Apple and NVIDIA hasn't gotten to the point of actually addressing this problem, however bad it really is. I guess I'll just wait and see.