Macbook Pro Early 2015 keeps restarting randomly

Question

Level 1

12 points

Macbook Pro Early 2015 keeps restarting randomly

A little bit of background: In September of this year my Macbook Pro started to restart itself all the time and I suspected that poor condition battery might be the issue. I replaced the battery in an Official Apple Store and afterward, everything worked fine for 2-3 months until the issue started again.

I’m living on an island in Thailand so it’s not so easy to reach an Apple Store to check the laptop so I took it to a friend who repairs laptops and we opened it, we cleaned the dust inside and removed the speakers because they were damaged (horrible sound). This didn’t help so I’ve reinstalled MacOS from scratch but the issue kept happening.

After a few days, the issue slowly disappeared with no possible explanation.

Yesterday the issue started again and this is what happened before and what is happening now:

In the beginning is just 1 or 2 restarts a day. Then it became insane by restarting every 1 to 5 minutes (randomly).

Sometimes it won’t show a login screen for more than just a few seconds and keeps restarting in an endless loop.

Sometimes I’m able to use it for an hour and then restarts again, even without running any software, just showing the Desktop.

I’ve tried resetting NVRAM, PRAM, SMC with any affection on the issue.

What blew my mind was that the “Previous shutdown cause” log always showed code 5 which is “Correct shut down”.

Executed code:

log show --predicate 'eventMessage contains "Previous shutdown cause"' --last 24h

The last thing that I’ve tried was disconnecting the battery and using it with the charger on but keeps restarting.

Any ideas? So far I’m not able to reproduce or isolate the issue so I’m not sure about the root cause.

MacBook Pro 13″, macOS 11.1

Posted on Jan 5, 2021 7:31 PM

Reply

Answer 1

Best reply

HWTech

Level 9

56,396 points

Jan 5, 2021 9:17 PM in response to hernan263

Run the Apple Diagnostics to see if any hardware issues are reported.

When you reinstalled macOS from scratch, did you erase the whole physical SSD or just the "Macintosh HD" volume? To make sure you have a fresh new partition and file system make sure to erase the whole physical SSD. Recent versions of Disk Utility hide the physical SSD from view by default so you must click on "View" within Disk Utility and select "Show All Devices" so that the physical drive appears on the left pane of Disk Utility. Here is an Apple article showing the procedure:

https://support.apple.com/guide/disk-utility/erase-and-reformat-a-storage-device-dskutl14079/mac

Do you have a spare USB drive you can use as a temporary external boot drive so that you can install macOS on it to bypass your internal SSD?

Does this issue occur when all external devices are disconnected from the laptop?

Reply

Answer 2

hernan263 Author

Level 1

12 points

Jan 5, 2021 9:28 PM in response to HWTech

Thanks for your reply. I already ran the diagnostic with no issues found.

Yes, I did erase the whole physical SSD just to be sure about having a deep fresh installation.

I'm not using any external device, so yes, it's occurring even with devices disconnected from the laptop.

Reply

Answer 3

HWTech

Level 9

56,396 points

Jan 6, 2021 5:52 PM in response to hernan263

If this happens with a clean install before you migrate from a backup or installing third party apps, then the only thing you can really do is try booting an external macOS USB drive to see if this solves the problem. If so, then there is likely an issue with the internal SSD. If you determine the internal SSD may be the cause of the problem, then you can replace it yourself using a third party NVMe SSD. Since Apple uses a proprietary PCIe SSD connector only OWC provides a drop in replacement, although you can use a standard M.2 SSD with a Sintech adapter if you are willing to risk having no support from the SSD vendor.

Otherwise you will need to have Apple examine the laptop to provide you with an estimate for repair.

Reply

Macbook Pro Early 2015 keeps restarting randomly

Similar questions