My Last Effort Before Selling, Macbook Question

[UDT89]

Hello All,

So I was given a broken Late 2011 Macbook pro for a very small debt that was owed to me. Made sense because selling as is I could get more than my debt and if I fixed it it would be a home run. I dont know much about apple products but since trying to fix this lappy myself I have learned a ton, so its not a total loss.

Basically the laptop boots to the apple logo, the loading circle spins, then it goes to a white screen. I believed the laptop might have water damage because the keyboard buttons are "crunchy" and a couple stick. I brought it to the apple store and they confirmed it but told me everything was working, including logic board, except the hard drive.

I'm no expert technician, but I have been fixing computers for over 15 years and make a decent side income fixing things. So here is what I've done and what the result was:

-tried booting with all the shortcuts available. Safe mode brings up a menu that I need to power off and reboot. Everything else doesnt work, meaning it does the same thing as if I booted normal. The recovery partition loads but then it brings the power message. Internet recovery wont happen because the wifi wont detect my home network

-burned a dvd and usb from a file I downloaded that had Mountain Lion. Computer recognizes it but it just restarts when I try to boot from them

-bought a hard drive that was pulled form a working macbook with mountain lion installed on it, which worked fine in the other macbook. Put it in mine, it goes into a continuous reboot after the spinning circle is done.

One weird side note, before I bought the replacement hard drive I had a hard drive laying around that I connected. It had an install of windows XP on it. The macbook booted right up to the windows XP home page and was working fine. I dont know if this means anything but it just makes me more confused.

I believe its the logic board, as much as I dont want it to be, and if it is I will probably ebay it as is. I am very appreciative of any help I get here.

Thanks

 

[UDT89]

**update**

installed software update, now boots fine to the home screen. Home screen was shrunk, so I had to change the display to 1024. Is that normal for this laptop? It sort of runs slow when I was changing the display size. That normal?





new update

laptop boots to safe mode just fine.




new update.

Tried booting with snow leopard on USB and it went to the install screen. Installed snow leopard just fine. Rebooted, then after apple logo goes to a black screen and either just the mouse pointer or a continuous spinning color wheel

Not sure its video related since the screen looked up just fine during the install process.

 

[Bubbaleone]

OS X natively uses the HFS+ journaling file system, and I think a freshly formatted drive will solve your problem. I'd take the drive you want to install on the Mac, connect it on a PC, then download and burn a copy of Parted Magic. Boot Parted Magic on the PC with the drive for the Mac, and then format that drive with HFS+ using the included GParted utility, which supports HFS+ formatting. After formatting to HFS+, reinstall the drive on the Mac and run the Snow Leopard install again. And personally, I'd run the DVD rather than USB.


.

 

[UDT89]

now after installing a second set of updates it boots to a white screen. i give up. im running repair permissions on the drive and there are a few hundred errors being repaird.


I was able to format the hard drive using the disk utility from the USB drive that had snow leopard, so it should be correct.

 

[Bubbaleone]

Well in that case, my next suggestion would be get a copy of Cocktail from Maintain (it's the swiss army knife for Macs) and run it on the current installation that won't boot to the desktop. They have a freeware version for OS X 10.5 that's really limited, but a single-user (lifetime upgrades) license is only fourteen bucks. I get the occasional Mac in for repair and I've found Cocktail to be an invaluable tool, especially for screwed-up disk and directory permission errors (which can definitely cause the endless spinning wheel and white screens), without having to be an expert using the terminal interface.

 

[UDT89]

when you say run it, you mean try to get back to safe mode and install it?

 

[Bubbaleone]

Sorry, yes it needs to be installed (see the Maintain FAQ), but let the disk utility finish the permissions repair and see if you're able to boot to the desktop. If it still won't boot to the desktop or you can't get into safe mode to install Cocktail, the tool I use for Mac's that are that messed up is called DiskWarrior, by Alsoft, but it cost me a hundred bucks. However, it will completely rebuild the operating system like it was a fresh installation, unless it can't see the HDD because the drive has actually failed.

If you're interested, here's a good tutorial from Michigan State U that gives you the rundown: Using DiskWarrior to repair problems on MacOS X computers

 

[UDT89]

thanks for the help. i ended up reinstalling snow leopard on the hard drive and it boots fine. Not sure what the updated files did to mess it up. i was able to install cocktail but for some reason when I go to the pilot section i cant click on the button to run it because its behind the icons at the bottom.

 

[Bubbaleone]

All I can think of is after you got Cocktail installed, maybe you didn't eject the .dmg? I've never run into what you're describing. I'm glad you're up and running!

 

[UDT89]

New problem now. There are some software updates. It makes it through the first set, but the one set that has thunderbolt, after it reboots it boots to a white screen. Only thing that works is another fresh install.

Tried multiple hard drives. All same. So frustrating.

 

[sze5003]

Have you formated the drive with a one pass of zeros ? I've done what you describe to a friend's MacBook and its worked fine with original hd after being dropped.

Sounds like some hardware that fails at times randomly. Maybe its needs the memory reset. It's been a while since I had a mac.

 

[UDT89]

Yea tried the one pass. You mean reset via boot up or opened and reset in the mobo

 

[Bubbaleone]

I think sze5003 is referring to resetting the NVRAM which can help eliminate some disk, as well as some kernel problems. This Apple article explains how to reset the memory: About NVRAM and PRAM

 

[UDT89]

Yea tried that too. The second set of updates always screws things up

A side note, after first updates the display is "shrunk". Meaning there's like a 2 inch border of black around the desktop background.

Safe mode the display is fine.