MacBook Pro 15", mid 2007 won't start up

psycx

Good evening all



My MBP has a strange issue. The symptoms are that I press the power button, hear Superdrive make a noise, HDD spins, light at the front stays on and is responsive to light changes, display stays black and there's no chime.



At first, it presented exactly the same as the well-known nVidia issue but I took it to the local AASP and they said it was something to do with the startup of the machine, not the nVidia chip. I didn't believe them at first because I brought it home and it started working, despite calling me to charge £375 for repair and £750 for new logic board. Also, at that time, I found that the date had been reset to default and that the machine booted up on Jan 1st at 00:01, according to the Console.



Fast forward to yesterday and this happened again - same symptoms. I intended to open the machine up and took out the battery while I got my screw drivers. Turned it on one last time and it came up...yay! Date was the same so they must have done something to reset this previously.



And now today - same again. This makes no sense to me - it can't be a software issue because of the resurrection, but it must be because they said they could repair it.



I hope someone with a little MBP repair experience can make sense of this and maybe shed some light on what the problem might be!



I've been in the PC support business for over 10 years and if it was a PC I'd say it would be BIOS or firmware related, but the intermittent nature of this makes no sense. Have tried resetting the SMU and PRAM.



Many thanks



-Dan

rokcet scientist

Sounds like a crashed harddrive. That would require replacement, of course.



I hope you have a good backup.

psycx

Hi Rokcet



Thanks for taking the time to reply, but I believe I would at least get a grey screen and be able to boot from the restore DVDs if it was a HDD problem.



All my data is on a NAS, anyway.



Thanks



Dan

ivan.rnn01

But you've nearly figured out the issue yourself... Display failures first, then completely dead screen. What else do you need to see to begin paying your earnest attention to machine's display?

The inverter seems being the very first suspect. Backlight burn out is far less probable, but should still be kept in mind. Only then come logic boards and other heavy stuff...

shredderclay

I had that problem for a couple of years, took it in for repair so many times. I found something was interesting that sometimes if I push the area around the button down and hit the power button it would boot okay. Regardless, I don't know what they done but they fixed it. Granted as many times as I took it down there they should have replaced it. My is a MBP that I purchased May of 2007.