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Macbook 2015 will not power on - screen black - force touch feedback working

Hi all,


Looking for some help with my Macbook 2015 12".


Currently I am stuck at the stage where the device will not power on and does not display anything. No chime on power either.



The problem.

Here is what I have discovered so far.

- The force touch seems to be the only way I can tell the machine is powered on. When clicking on the touchpad, I receive a force touch back.

- I can hold the power button for 5 seconds and the device will power off. I only know this as the force touch stops working.

- I have tried resetting SMC (ctrl + power) and PRAM (option + command + p + r) - does not seem to make a difference.


So here I am stuck.



Here is what happened before shutting down. As a side note, this is the second time this has happened and I can only associate both times to finder crashing. The last time I managed to get it working again by leaving it in power on mode (force touch pushing back) overnight to let the battery run down. Put power back in and powered on. It then booted as normal. Obviously I don't want to have to do this again / every time and I think finding a solution to the below might resolve this.


Possible Cause

Before shutting down, my finder crashed. I believe this was caused by a network drive that still appeared mounted and in /Volumes, but was no longer accessible as it was not on the same network. Office share to home network, of course it's not going to see it.


I attempted to force reload finder. Finder would not behave as normal and not open up.

I opened a terminal and force unmounted the network drive from /Volumes using "diskutil unmountdisk force /Volumes/drive"

I could then click open new window, I would then have to select "Window > (new window name e.g. Documents)"

It would then bring that window to the front and I would have access to finder again. Network drives had disappeared from the side.

The computer appears to work as normal other than that. The only finder issue is it would not bring Finder windows to front when clicking on it.


I attempted a shutdown, Desktop closes but the dock stays. It hangs at this and does not shut down, requiring me to hold the power button to hard reset.

The first time this happened, I could not shut down using Finder. I opened up a terminal window and ran a shutdown command, but did exactly the same thing.



I will see if the machine powers back on when it runs out of battery again. But this is not overly helpful or productive to be without a computer for this long. Especially considering how long it takes to eat through the battery.



Any help appreciated. Thanks.

Posted on Jul 2, 2015 3:44 AM

Reply
6 replies

Jul 20, 2015 7:03 AM in response to partyce

In the end the only solution was to take the computer to the Apple store. I went to the store on opening and registered a time slot which was just over an hour wait on a Monday morning. I would not recommend doing this on the weekend as after a half hour wait on opening to get a time slot I was told it would be about 4 hours. After 8 hours I was notified they were ready for me. I had already left in disgust by that point. This was in the Watford store in the UK.


The Brent Cross store was much more helpful and the genius engineer basically said "Yep that's broke" and registered it via the online portal for me to go back and speak with the techies. They did offer to replace in store, but mine was the higher spec model and they had none in the store to swap out with.

After speaking with the online team (as it was ordered online), they saw the notes and arranged a replacement (as recommended in the notes by the genius technician). UPS collected the laptop the next day and a new one was shipped. A week later and I am now typing this on my replacement macbook.


I personally could not recover any data from the machine.

Jul 20, 2015 7:04 AM in response to Dharmalicious

Dharmalicious. If you get the charm sound and the other bits work, then attempt the key combos on boot. Your BIOS is fine.


In the store, the genius could not get a chime sound, which meant the BIOS was dead.

The other indicator was that the CAPS lock light would not turn on but the trackpad was still working on haptic, meaning power was there, but it would not boot past BIOS.

Jul 20, 2015 5:43 PM in response to ZD210

Hello,


Thank you for your response. This is good info. I have tried all the recommended dtart ups with pressing P R and the shift key and it only restarts it with the chime but screen remains black. I read somewhere to let the battery drain so now I am giving it a few days to do that. Yester day I tried to start it and the start up screen was trying then went black again. If it does not start in a few days I am going to arrange to call tech support in the U.S. where I bought it before I take a 6 hour bus trip to the closest repair shop.

What does BIOS mean?

What was the finally diagnosis of your Mac?


Thank you!

Sarvasmarana

Macbook 2015 will not power on - screen black - force touch feedback working

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