Starts up for 1 second then shuts off .. logic board problem or drive?

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Level 1

8 points

Starts up for 1 second then shuts off .. logic board problem or drive?

So my MacBook Pro will not turn on. When you hit the power button, you hear a quick whirl and 1 second later it shuts down. Too quick to get anything on the screen, literally just one second it tries to power up and off. Power cord connected, battery charged. So I wonder .. is it the hard drive or the logic board. I can't even reset PRAM or anything because it won't stay on long enough to use key combos to set it up. I am going to try to put my other mac in target disk mode and try to extract things from the dead MacBook Pro hard drive but it wont turn on to even make it a slave. Can I get things off the hard drive if the computer won't turn on. Any ideas guys/gals? 😕

MBP 15" 2.4GHz, Mac OS X (10.6.4), 4 GB RAM 667 Mhz DDR2 SDRAM, AirPort Extreme (802.11n)

Posted on Jun 18, 2011 5:06 AM

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Answer 1

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BGreg

Level 6

17,552 points

Jun 18, 2011 12:01 PM in response to aveger

Try holding the shift key down when you push the power button ... this will do a safe start, if possible. If it does start up that way, shut it down and try again normally, as sometimes the disk and other maintenance the safe start does will get things going.

If you have the original OS X disks that came with your MBP, you can see if you can get a DVD into it and boot off the DVD or, hold the alt key down when you start to see if it will let you boot to the Apple hardware test. It may be impossible based on what you're describing, however.

This doesn't sound like a hard drive issue, as even if the hard drive is missing, the system will start up and tell you it can't find anything to boot from.

Assuming the hard drive is good, you can mount the hard drive in an external enclosure (for 2.5" SATA drives) and then connect it to another system to pull the information off of it.

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Answer 2

aveger Author

Level 1

8 points

Jun 25, 2011 12:06 AM in response to BGreg

The notebook won't start up enough to even try the keyboard combinations for alternate start-ups. I think you are right about having to then mount the drive outside in an enclosure after I learn how to remove it first. I think the logic board may be the problem because my wife's same model at the end of year one in 2008 also needed replacement (they gave her a new mac) but her's was under warranty. I wonder even outside warranty Apple replaces it because there was a lot of problems with this year MacBook Pro documented. Thanks for the advice. I am not sure whether to ship it to Apple for repair, or take out the hard drive first to copy the drive info. Not sure how much they would charge for repair. Still beats buying a new $1800 notebook again.

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