thangn

Q: MacBook won't start up

My MacBook (2010) no longer starts up. When I press the power button, it boots up but hangs at this screen before shutting itself down.

 

The day before, I had put it into standby and it had run out of battery while in standby. I've done this many times before and normally it resumes fine.

 

I can get into the recovery partition okay, but am wondering if anyone knows how to fix this as I really do not want to do a clean install :/

 

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

MacBook, OS X Yosemite (10.10.3)

Posted on May 26, 2015 6:32 AM

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Q: MacBook won't start up

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  • by D.Cohen,

    D.Cohen D.Cohen May 26, 2015 6:39 AM in response to thangn
    Level 6 (8,424 points)
    Desktops
    May 26, 2015 6:39 AM in response to thangn

    Follow the steps suggested by Apple in this article:

    https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204267


    Hope this helps!

  • by thangn,

    thangn thangn May 27, 2015 5:11 AM in response to D.Cohen
    Level 1 (0 points)
    May 27, 2015 5:11 AM in response to D.Cohen

    Thanks for the suggestion but I've already tried resetting the SMC and PRAM to no avail

  • by Moderus,

    Moderus Moderus May 28, 2015 2:22 PM in response to thangn
    Level 1 (0 points)
    May 28, 2015 2:22 PM in response to thangn

    Try holding shift when you power on, and then release after the Apple logo appears. This should put you into safe mode. If it works, restart like normal and see if it solves the issue.

  • by K Shaffer,Solvedanswer

    K Shaffer K Shaffer May 28, 2015 2:55 PM in response to thangn
    Level 6 (14,523 points)
    Desktops
    May 28, 2015 2:55 PM in response to thangn

    Did you try the Disk Utility as found in OS X Utilities, via Recovery? With that you could

    try & repair the hard drive; it may (or not) give you a warning if the drive is going bad...

     

    Usually running out of power, repeatedly, is bad for the battery and then you have shortened

    its life by so doing. You may have to consider having a diagnostic test performed to see if

    there is a problem with the hard drive, the charging circuit, battery, and Magsafe adapter.

    And the cycle count in system hardware profile for battery, may appear low, but after the

    full-discharge events, it would never be able to have as long a prospective life as intended.

     

    An Apple Store with Genius bar may be able to help test these &/or offer suggestions. And

    if it requires service, that may be due to damaged files or bad sectors on the hard drive.

    By frequent power interruptions, the software on the hard drive may have been corrupted

    to the point of there being other issues including start-up failure; or circuit board damage.

     

    • Mac notebooks: All about batteries - Apple Support

     

    • Apple Portables: Troubleshooting MagSafe adapters - Apple Support

     

    Hopefully the matter isn't too involved to get it working again.

    Good luck & happy computing!

  • by thangn,

    thangn thangn May 29, 2015 3:21 PM in response to K Shaffer
    Level 1 (0 points)
    May 29, 2015 3:21 PM in response to K Shaffer

    Thanks for your help everyone!

     

    I tried booting into safe mode but that didn't work.

    I then went into recovery and used Disk Utility to try and verify and repair my drive but I got this.

     

    So what I ended up doing was going into recovery to reinstall OS X (I didn't know you could do this without losing files).

    My laptop boots up fine now! However, the desktop mail program has stopped working but that's an issue for another thread

     

    I've been reading around and I think this was the issue with my startup.

    About a year ago I had replaced the HDD with an SSD. I'm running Yosemite and I had downloaded a program to enable Trim, which disables kext-signing. It's been running fine from this new SSD for a while but I guess something screwed up here to cause it to freeze up at startup.

     

    Anyways, thanks all for your help

  • by K Shaffer,

    K Shaffer K Shaffer May 29, 2015 10:14 PM in response to thangn
    Level 6 (14,523 points)
    Desktops
    May 29, 2015 10:14 PM in response to thangn

    Some users experienced issue when using Trim utilities in SSD products, with Yosemite.

    And if you had an OWC branded sandforce or better SSD, they do not recommend Trim.

     

    Glad to hear you were able to reinstall the system and not lose your saved content.

    Be sure to maintain an external backup archive; perhaps consider a full clone, too.

     

    Good luck & happy computing!