So, a friend's workplace dumped a lot of their old inventory for recycling. They let employees grab whatever they wanted before they ship it all off, and he brought me ten A1286 15" mid-2010 Macbook Pros with gutted drives to see if I could do anything with them rather than let them be melted down to make beer cans.
Five of them had exploded batteries that spilled over and likely destroyed the logic board and bent the bottom out of shape, no saving those ones, they don't even power on. Three of them look fine internally but also refuse to power on, no saving those either I'd guess.
The two remaining ones power on, but flash a folder icon with a question mark, so those have some hope.
I installed a few spare HDDs in them, reset PRAM, checked to see if they're High Sierra compatible (they are) and loaded up a USB with High Sierra Patcher and made a bootable High Sierra installer. Install went fine but when I restart, it gives a no-entry error icon. Restarted with Option key held, but any attempt to boot from the new install or the newly created recovery partition still results in a no-entry icon. And at this point, they refuse to boot the USB installer as well.
Wiped the drives using my spare T430, reinstalled again, same problem.
To preempt some replies, no, the drives aren't defective. I use them regularly for data transfers and backups, and they work fine in all my PCs.
I'm not 100% versed in the internal workings of Macbooks, so I don't know if Internet Recovery boots off the recovery partition on the data drive or whether it's stored on the logic board somewhere, but that didn't work either, nothing happens when trying to invoke it. Either it also boots from the data drive, or they never updated the firmware to support Internet Recovery, or both, I don't know.
I searched around for other solutions and the best one I could find suggests replacing the SATA/power cable. Seeing as I had eight spare parts machines, I had plenty to try. Still no dice though, even after five transplanted cables. What are the chances that all these cables are defective?
In a last desperate attempt, I took the HDD caddy from my T430, disassembled it down the just the SATA-to-slimlineSATA adapter, removed the Macbook DVD drive, and connected the HDD with the adapter to the Macbook's DVD drive connector. This just causes the Macbook to kick into full blast fan mode and refuses to show anything on the gray screen.
The final answer I found was that it's possible the logic board is hosed. Is this really the end of the line? I've pretty much exhausted everything I could think of and every answer on Google is "try to boot into recovery," suggestions which I've already tried countless times.
Five of them had exploded batteries that spilled over and likely destroyed the logic board and bent the bottom out of shape, no saving those ones, they don't even power on. Three of them look fine internally but also refuse to power on, no saving those either I'd guess.
The two remaining ones power on, but flash a folder icon with a question mark, so those have some hope.
I installed a few spare HDDs in them, reset PRAM, checked to see if they're High Sierra compatible (they are) and loaded up a USB with High Sierra Patcher and made a bootable High Sierra installer. Install went fine but when I restart, it gives a no-entry error icon. Restarted with Option key held, but any attempt to boot from the new install or the newly created recovery partition still results in a no-entry icon. And at this point, they refuse to boot the USB installer as well.
Wiped the drives using my spare T430, reinstalled again, same problem.
To preempt some replies, no, the drives aren't defective. I use them regularly for data transfers and backups, and they work fine in all my PCs.
I'm not 100% versed in the internal workings of Macbooks, so I don't know if Internet Recovery boots off the recovery partition on the data drive or whether it's stored on the logic board somewhere, but that didn't work either, nothing happens when trying to invoke it. Either it also boots from the data drive, or they never updated the firmware to support Internet Recovery, or both, I don't know.
I searched around for other solutions and the best one I could find suggests replacing the SATA/power cable. Seeing as I had eight spare parts machines, I had plenty to try. Still no dice though, even after five transplanted cables. What are the chances that all these cables are defective?
In a last desperate attempt, I took the HDD caddy from my T430, disassembled it down the just the SATA-to-slimlineSATA adapter, removed the Macbook DVD drive, and connected the HDD with the adapter to the Macbook's DVD drive connector. This just causes the Macbook to kick into full blast fan mode and refuses to show anything on the gray screen.
The final answer I found was that it's possible the logic board is hosed. Is this really the end of the line? I've pretty much exhausted everything I could think of and every answer on Google is "try to boot into recovery," suggestions which I've already tried countless times.
Last edited:
