lundi 31 décembre 2018

Early-2011 13-in. MacBook Pro startup problem

My friend came to town to spend her holiday and she took her early-2011 13-in. MBP along to show me the startup problem. She said that about two months ago the machine suddenly could not boot and remained unbootable since.

When I turned on her MBP, the startup status bar looked different. There was a thick gray bar below the Apple logo, the same gray status bar that appeared after applying a firmware and security update. The usual startup status bar is a thinner black line. The gray status bar progressed to about halfway then the screen went black and nothing happened after that as if the machine shut itself down. After waiting a few minutes I pressed the power button again and the booting started all over then failed pretty much at the same spot.

I then used target mode to connect her machine to my early-2011 15-in. MBP. It took quite a few minutes before the icon of the SSD in her machine appeared on my Desktop along with the error message that the drive was unbootable but I could retrieve the files in there. The SSD in her MBP has OS 10.9 installed. I copied all the files that she wanted to save to my MBP.

Since my MBP could read her SSD, I launched Disk Utility to verify the problematic drive. There was a long list of errors with its directory. I did not attempt the repair as I was set to format the SSD and install OS 10.12 on it.

After shutting down her MBP, I removed the SSD and put one of my spare HDD with OS 10.12 in the machine. The next startup was successfully after more than five minutes. Her MBP was on a/c power and the little light showed green. But the battery indicator showed zero percent juice with the "Replace Now" message. Looked like the battery was dead. The cursor movement was jittery and the overall performance was very sluggish like slow motion.

Just to satisfy me that there wasn't a problem that prevented the battery to recharge, I followed the instructions to remove the battery and held the power button down for 20 seconds to reset the SMC. I inserted the battery back in her MBP, took out the OS 10.12 HDD and put in the working OS 10.12 SSD in my MBP in her machine. I also reset NVRAM on the next restart. The startup was a little faster until the last part which took perhaps two minutes. Finally the Desktop appeared but the cursor movement and performance remained sluggish.

Could a battery that suddenly died cause a directory corruption of the OS? Does a dead battery cause the sluggish performance? Would a new battery fix the performance problem?

But the bigger question is whether it is worthwhile to replace the battery even though everything else with the machine appears to be fine. This is a 2011 model and Apple classifies it as vintage. It won't run OS 10.14 and above. My friend no longer needs her MBP. But I hate to throw out a working machine.


via ehMac.ca http://bit.ly/2AoYYXz

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