Black Screen of death

Hi all,

I got the "Black Screen of death (BSoD)" last week and after reviewing everything I could on the interwebs, I believe I found a unique fix for the specific condition that caused my BSoD.

My MacBook Air (MBA) was working perfectly and just for giggles I decided to install windows 10 using Bootcamp. Well the documentation and implementation of bootcamp is abysmal to say the least, not one to be put off by bad coding etc, I pushed on and managed to get Windows 10 installing on a bootcamp partition. Everything went as per a normal Win10 install, until the first reboot, which the MBA never recovered from.

My MBA is not under warranty.

The MBA didn't respond to any boot commands (yes I tried them all multiple times) and I was never able to get any video to the screen or remote screens. As far as I and multiple other geeks that had helped try and recover MBA could determine the MBA was "Bricked".

The first clue to the solution came when the battery was nearly flat and the flat battery symbol appeared on the screen. OK, this means the screen is good, but why didn't the keyboard commands boot me into a preloading screen?

At this point I had nothing to lose so outcome the tools. I did have a NIC plugged to a network with DHCP.

I removed the back cover unhooked the battery, and tried to start the MBA, same BSoD.

I removed the HDD (Yeah thanks Apple for your proprietary connectors), tried to start the MBA, the no disk symbol appeared. :-) Happy happy joy joy this was going somewhere.

Next I added a USB3 64 GB disk and booted into recovery mode "CMD+R", and I got the recovery looking for network then it booted into the first recovery screen. Woot! I started up the disk tool and hot added the Apple HDD back but it couldn't see the disk. Removed the internal disk and repeated all the above, this time I did a recovery to the 64GB USB drive, 60 minutes later the MBA was alive!

I manually selected the USB drive as the one to boot from, shutdown the MBA and reconnected the HDD. The MBA booted up from the USB drive and this time it detected the original HDD.

I ran the bootcamp tool and selected remove Windows 7. The partitioning tool did it's job I selected the internal HDD from preferences to boot from, crossed my fingers and rebooted the MBA.

It worked!

Root cause, faulty partition and how MAC OSX handles pre-boot. BootCamp broke the HDD.

Anyway, I hope this helps anyone out there with a Bricked MBA sitting in the cupboard.