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abarsam Author

Level 1

4 points

No boot condition after upgrade to 10.8.3, EFI 1.6, Mid-2009 15" MBP 2.53Ghz

Hi,

I've got a Mid-2009 15" MBP. After I upgraded to 10.8.3, my computer got into a situation where, upon waking from sleep, it became unresponsive, and then gave me the "no entry" sign after I hard-rebooted it.

I took the drive out, put it in an external enclosure, found that it booted via USB. I then put the drive back in the computer and to my surprise, it booted and worked properly -- for about a week, at which time the problem recurred.

Some more detail: a while back I upgraded the HDD to a Seagate Momentus 7200 750GB, model ST9750420AS. I encountered poor performance, spinning beach balls, refusal to wake from hibernate, etc. I came upon the EFI 1.6 monster thread (https://discussions.apple.com/thread/2054387) and downgraded my EFI to 1.6 and kept it there. Everything worked great for more than a year, until the 10.8.3 update and no boot.

It looks like some people who downgraded to 1.6 are having issues with 10.8.3 as well, but with an HDD/SSD in the optical drive (https://discussions.apple.com/thread/4895074). I can confirm I'm having issues with it when the optical drive is intact and I'm using a SATA HDD in the HDD bay. This is a supported configuration (my owner's manual even has instructions for upgrading the HDD).

The second time it happened I tried what the folks in the second thread above did and downgraded to 10.8.0, then upgraded to 10.8.2. I can say that at this time it seems to be working. So my questions are:

1) Is 10.8.2 the last Lion update this MBP will ever be able to install?

2) Has anyone who was previously running EFI 1.6 / 10.8.2 had this issue and had success with the 10.8.3 / EFI 1.7 combination (upgrading both at the same time)?

3) Has Apple or anyone else found a definitive list of HDD/SSDs that work reliably with this rather finicky logic board/disk controller?

4) Anyone else running EFI 1.6 / 10.8.3 having a similar experience? Should I be worried about the longevity/integrity of my hardware at this point?

Thanks. Please chime in especially if you have a similar configuration/experience.

Alex

MacBook Pro, OS X Mountain Lion (10.8.3)

Posted on Mar 26, 2013 5:27 PM

Top-ranking reply

Scott Buchanan1

Level 1

25 points

Posted on Mar 26, 2013 7:52 PM

I just four days going through this pain. I had a wd7500 drive which I had previously downgraded the EFI to 1.6 to get to work. I upgraded to 10.8.3 and the system would only boot about 1 in 10 times. Once booted it worked fine. I assumed that the drive had gone bad and had WD send a replacement under their warranty, which they did very promptly. I installed and restored from Time Machine (an amazingly painless process) and had the same problem. I then thought I had a logic board problem and was getting ready to go to the apple store when I decided to put the original disk back in. Poof, booted right up. I had resigned myself to getting a new disk. In doing so I figured I'd update the EFI back to 1.7 in preparation for that and low and behold everything is now working just fine.

In conclusion, for me, after upgrading to 10.8.3, upgrading to EFI 1.7 made everything work again.

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46 replies

Jeffro_C

Level 1

4 points

Jul 18, 2015 10:39 AM in response to fiachnamm

This totally worked for me! I was skeptical that my sata cable was what was preventing me from upgrading beyond Lion, but this did the trick after exploring every other fix that I had read about.

No boot condition after upgrade to 10.8.3, EFI 1.6, Mid-2009 15" MBP 2.53Ghz