Chosen Solution
I have this 15” MacBook Pro from 2009, 2.53GHZ, A1286. It will boot, show the Apple logo, and sometimes get to the desktop. Very quickly after it will turn off completely, as if someone pulled the battery (computer completely turns off, not just the backlight or screen). So far my troubleshooting has been: Tried swapping both RAMs into each slot respectively.Tried booting from a USB flash drive with HD removed.Tried booting the computer from a charger with the battery unplugged.I tried the NVRAM zap and SMC reset. The only thing that fixed it temporarily was leaving the computer unplugged completely with the battery unplugged overnight. Then it worked fine, until the battery ran itself down and I tried booting it this morning with a charger plugged in. Any ideas?
If you are running 10.5x try to boot to the repair/recovery partition and run AHT. If that fails see if it will target boot (I’m suspecting a HD failure since it partially boots sometimes). If Target boot is unsuccessful and you have access to more than one Mac you can pull the HD put it in an External Case and see if it’s damaged, and if you can repair that damage (munnged MBD vs hardware failure) If you have another boot volume try booting from it. If this answer is acceptable please remember to return and mark it.
See 2010 MacBook Pro shutdown during boot (OS is good) A bad keyboard can lead to these symptoms.
