Boot hangs at Apple logo with progress bar

Question

Level 2

303 points

Boot hangs at Apple logo with progress bar

Hi all,

My early 2011 MacBook Pro will not complete the boot process. I shut it down normally last night. This morning, pressing the power button resulted in the following:

Chime
An abnormal boot screen: a little more blue than usual, the Apple logo is in a box, and appears to have only half the pixels.
Progress bar advances very slowly, also has the same odd appearance.
Apple logo and progress bar vanish.
System reboots.

I tried holding down the option key to boot from a different volume. All the attached disks show up, but are hard to read because half the pixels are missing. I select 10.6.8, but the same boot problem, but without the reboot. I had to hold the power key to reboot it.

I tried booting into safe mode - same problem. I put a weight on the shift key to hold it down while I did other things. I returned about 10 minutes later to the same grey screen. While I could hear the disk spin, I did not hear the heads moving, so I assume nothing was being read nor written.

This is an early 2011 MacBook Pro, running 10.13.6, security update installed about 2 weeks ago.

Thanks in advance for any guidance you may provide.

MacBook Pro 15", macOS 10.13

Posted on Mar 30, 2020 10:36 AM

Reply

Answer 1

Top-ranking reply

Tesserax

Level 10

151,665 points

Mar 30, 2020 10:45 AM in response to WoodPlane

Try steps 2, 5, & 6 in the following user tip article to see if they can help:

Mac Basic Startup Troubleshooting Steps - Apple Community

Please post back your results.

Reply

Answer 2

WoodPlane Author

Level 2

303 points

Mar 31, 2020 3:54 PM in response to Tesserax

It happened again today. This time I:

Reset the SMC, reboot, still failed.
Reset PRAM, hangs and starts getting warm, fan spins up, no disk activity. Power-key force shutdown.
Rest the SMC, reboot, this time worked.

While I’ve only done this twice, seems to need reset PRAM, followed by reset SMC.

I ran Apple Hardware Test. Short version passed, extended test found this:

4MEM/62/40000000: 0x851e1598

So I assume the next step is reseat the DRAM DIMMs and run AHT again, replace DRAM if errors persist.

Reply

Answer 3

WoodPlane Author

Level 2

303 points

Mar 30, 2020 12:06 PM in response to Tesserax

I am back up and running. Thanks for the help.

I reset the SMC, then PRAM, which starts the boot process. The same issue again. Having read the SMC reboot article, I went back and did it again, but after releasing all the keys, pressed the power key to boot it. The boot screen display looked normal again, and it booted into 10.6.8. I rebooted from the login screen, and this time booted 10.13.6. It took a long time, but came up. Login took a long time as well.

I ran Disk Utility, which found a problem that were solved by running it again from recovery. The only problem was an incorrect block count for a file.

In the past, about one in ten boots results in a black login screen. If I type my username and password, login proceeds normally. Not sure if that is related.

Reply

Answer 4

Tesserax

Level 10

151,665 points

Mar 30, 2020 12:34 PM in response to WoodPlane

Thanks for providing me with the updated status. Looks like you got your self "back up and running" again. Great work!

A 2011 notebook is starting to get a bit "long in the tooth" so I wouldn't be surprised if you will start seeing more issues as time goes on ... especially if it is still running all of its original parts. FWIW, I still have my 2010 MBP and kept it running with DIY replacement parts (battery, memory, drive, etc.), but this particular model is notorious for having a flaky GPU which results in white areas of the screen appearing with pink lines. There are some workarounds, but I don't expect they will last much longer before having to retire it. Shame as Apple made some great notebooks earlier.

Reply

Answer 5

WoodPlane Author

Level 2

303 points

Mar 30, 2020 3:15 PM in response to Tesserax

Sorry to hear that - I like my MBP and was hoping to keep it forever. Interesting about the GPU. I sometimes use my MBP with a Thunderbolt Display. If I use it several days in a row, it will start displaying a completely scrambled image. The cure seems to be to turn it off and not use it for a few days. I had originally thought it was the monitor, but I have seen this happen to the laptop display as well, though only once or twice.

Reply