Chosen Solution
As of 7am this morning my Macbook Pro 15" Unibody (june 2009) refuses to power on at all, no fan, no hdd activity, no lcd activity… all i get when i press the power button is a quick flash of the sleep indicator on the front panel next to the IR sensor. I’ve tried resetting PRAM/SMC with no success, i also removed the batter and pressed power for 10 seconds, no success. As the laptop is clearly out of warranty, can anyone offer any troubleshooting advice ?
OK, lets start again, Please answer these questions:
- What is the color of the Mag-Safe plug? Green or Orange. When the system is off and does it get to Green.
- You had stated you might have been using the wrong power adapter. Are you using the correct one for this system (80W)?
- Open the system up and disconnect the HD SATA cable. Now restart your system what happens?
- With the internal drive disconnected, but only if you are getting the folder with the question mark displayed put in your system recovery CD/DVD into the optical drive is the system able to boot up?
- If you don’t have a recovery CD/DVD do you have a known working USB or FireWire HD which you can connect (it must be externally powered for this test). Is the system able to boot up?
What is the color of the Mag-Safe plug Green or Orange? Are you up to doing some digging here? I would start by opening up the system so you can disconnect the HD SATA cable. Your symptom sounds like you have power, just that the draw is to great so it shuts down. If the HD has died the motor can short out so by disconnecting the HD we should see a different response when you start it up again. If you have an external HD FireWire or USB with a bootable OS present on it you may want to give that a try after you first see if it tries to startup. Please let us know what you discover - Good Luck!
Check the voltage of the power supply with a polymeter on the motherboard. There is a chance the problem is on the power supply.
