Chosen Solution
I have a late 2011 Macbook Pro I am trying to fix. The device charges fine but pressing the power button reveals 0 activity: no fans spin, no drives move, no lights come on. The only signs of life I can get out if it come if I try to preform the SMC reset by pressing Shift+Control+Option and the power button. After doing this the system shows a loading screen with a bar but shuts down after only a couple seconds. If I pull the hard drive the system spends 60 seconds on the patented Apple light grey screen before showing a file with a question mark (which I’m assuming means the OS was not found) where it hangs indefinitely. The same behaviour happens when unplugging the battery and plugging it back in. I should mention the hard drive seems to work as I have successfully retrieved files from it for the user. Inside looks pretty clean and when I can get the device going both fans spin freely. Any diagnostic steps would be greatly appreciated. I do have a multimeter if you need me to take any voltages off the logic board. Update (08/21/2017) It won’t go into safemode , it’s as if its ignored my inputs entirely. Here are the modes I have been able to use: Hardware Test: Starts, Memory Test Passed. Verbose Mode: Crashes during “Checking catalog file..” Boot Option: Selecting windows 10 install media crashes on boot, same with recovery.
Have you tried starting up in Safe Mode (holding the shift key)? Try that first then try Recovery Mode and reload the OS. Here’s a useful reference: Startup key combinations for Mac Update (08/21/2017) Sounds like your drive has crashed if you can’t get into the hidden recovery partition. To start off here we need to focus on MacOS while you may want to run MS Windows for now lets put that aside. You’ll need a friend who has a Mac to help you here. Ideally, you’ll want to create a bootable MacOS installer on a USB thumb drive. Follow this guide: How to create a bootable macOS Sierra installer drive. Using it you can try to run Disk Utility to salvage the drive. Most likely you’ll need a new drive and I would recommend you also replace the HD SATA cable as well as it too could be the issue. Here’s the IFIXIT guides you’ll need to follow: MacBook Pro 15" Unibody Late 2011 Hard Drive ReplacementMacBook Pro 15" Unibody Late 2011 Hard Drive/IR Sensor Cable Replacement I would recommend getting either the SSHD (hybrid HD) or SSD drive
