White screen at OSX reinstall

[KingCotch]

Hi there community!

This evening I purchased a refurbished MacBook Pro from a local guy who is very good at what he does. its a 15" early 2011 MacBook Pro. he has changed the hhd for an ssd and put a new battery in too. He has used a work around to install the unsupported Catalina os. he showed me all up and running fine before I purchased it.

When I got home I opened it up and change the Ram to the Max 16gb and turned it back on and it was all working fine. however I don't like the newer os I prefer High Sierra. So I decided to Downgrade, I opened up internet recovery and I reformatted the APFS back to Mac OS Extended and began the installation of high Sierra. everything went well, it downloaded and installed but got to about 80% of the way through and it just hung for hours and eventually got really hot and the fans ramped up so I decided it was best to turn it off and try and start again. However now what ever I try to do it just ends up hanging on white screen. if I use standard recovery or internet recovery or even installing os from thumb drive it just starts the process then goes to white screen nd the fans kick up and it gets really hot.

What can I do?!?!?!

 

[Sanpete]

Did you run the hardware test?

How to use Apple Hardware Test on your Mac - Apple Support

Apple Hardware Test (AHT) contains a suite of diagnostics that test the hardware of your Mac.

support.apple.com

There may be better answers, but if you're near an Apple Store the easiest thing may be to take it in for free diagnosis (which they'll hopefully do even though they don't support that model anymore if you go when they aren't busy). My impression is that the tool they plug in may be able to bypass some kinds of problems hard to fix at home.

 

[Fishrrman]

Do you know what "RadeonGate" is?

If not, you'd better research it and find out.

Sounds like you may have bought a computer that's afflicted with it.

 

[Brian33]

I have the same Early 2011 MBP. As Fishrrman alludes to above, these machines are highly prone to failure of the AMD discrete GPU. My sense is that virtually all succumb to this problem sooner or later. Your problem might be something else, but I think it is likely to be the GPU chip failure.

It is still possible to make it into a usable machine by forcing it to use the graphics processing built in to the Intel CPU, instead of AMD graphics chip. This can be done by either software hacks or hardware modification, but either route will be very challenging for the inexperienced.