Q: MacBook Pro shutting down randomly and difficult to restart
MacBook Pro 17" early 2009, 2.93 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
750GB ST9750420AS hard drive, 8GB RAM
Yosemite 10.10.5
Randomly shutting down - eg when sleeping, sometimes will shut down rather than wake - sometimes will simply shut down on its own (both happened when only power cable and ethernet connected). Sometimes when, for example, accessing iPhoto library on USB connected disk, as soon as Photos tries to start up - shut down. Sometimes when left at night (not sleeping) it's off in the morning.
Then can be hard to restart. For example, this morning...
Was sleeping overnight, pressed space bar - shut down
Refused to start a number of times (sometimes just a slight noise from the hard drive, then nothing, sometimes the grey screen and the Apple logo for a few seconds, then nothing).
Tried selecting Recovery Disk instead of Macintosh HD. Same as above.
Tried connecting usb cloned boot disk. Same again.
Reset SMC (have done this many times in the past, by the way). Same again.
Reset NVRAM (also done many times in the past). A much longer attempt to start up this time - progress bar under Apple logo almost half way, then shut down.
Reset SMC and NVRAM. Started!
The hard drive is a bit clicky and I have a replacement SSD drive on order, but I suspect this may well not be the problem. I live a few hours drive from the nearest Apple Centre so can't just pop in to ask the Genius Bar. Also it is my work computer, so can't really afford to be without it. Many years of software and files on board (although well backed up) so reluctant to erase disk and re-install. Trouble is though, if I fit the new drive and clone the existing one, will I be cloning the problem too!
Any thoughts?
Posted on Sep 15, 2016 3:30 AM