Did Mavericks upgrade kill my early 2008 15" MacBook Pro?

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Did Mavericks upgrade kill my early 2008 15" MacBook Pro?

I have an early 2008 15" MacBook Pro which I upgraded to Mavericks last Saturday. Yesterday was the first time I tried to power it up after shutting it down on Sunday evening. The disk drive spins up and the light on the front latch also comes on, but nothing else, the screen remains blank.

I've tried switching off and on multiple times, resetting PRAM and SMC with no luck. It won't boot into recovery mode either.

I've read about the faulty graphics card issue, however the replacement program ended last year and I never had an issue with it. I've also read that it could be a fault with the logic board...

However, could the upgrade from Mountain Lion to Mavericks have caused the problem? A few search results on Google seems to indicate people have had similar issues.

Any suggestions would be very appreciated.

MacBook Pro (15-inch Early 2008), OS X Mavericks (10.9)

Posted on Oct 30, 2013 7:51 AM

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Answer 1

Nov 22, 2013 6:26 AM in response to huskypup

It is starting to look like Mavericks took out my company-issued 15" MacBook Pro as well. I installed Mavericks on my machine last week and it was working superbly. Then I noticed that the area between the battery/memory compartment and the back of the machine was getting really, really warm. Then it stopped working.

I get the chime happening now (after several various reset cycles), the grey apple comes up and the grey spinning gear runs for about 90 seconds, then stops, and that's all she rote.

I went through a list of things to try including disk repair, disk permissions repair, and re-installing Mavericks. The Mavericks network install actually completed, but the machine would not boot.

I got very good help from the Apple Genius Bar running diagnostics. The machine would boot Snow Leopard (what I was running before Mavericks) and would boot 10.8 (Mountain Lion?) from their network, but would not boot Mavericks, and would fail to boot differently from attempt to attempt.

Their diagnostics complained about the memory not being Apple memory (I inherited this from a guy who was likely to have installed an after-market memory upgrade).

I did the memory dance this morning (taking out one of the two cards and then trying them in various sockets). No differnce no joy.

I think he's dead, Jim. And I'm willing to say that Mavericks killed him...

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