I have a G5 that has started intermittently booting up with a totally blank screen - not blue, no video at all. Sometimes on reboot or after resetting the PRAM it works again.
View 2 RepliesI came home for lunch today, and found my Mac Mini G4 with the fan running, and a blank screen. It was obviously locked up. System has 10.5.2 with all of the latest updates. This is not my primary system, I have an MBP for that.
Here is what I did:
Force a power off/on, and I get the normal gray screen with the Apple, and spinning gear, but it never stops spinning.
I just bought a powerbook, and I'm trying to get it to turn on. It doesn't have a hard drive, so obviously it won't be able to get it to boot. I just want to be able to get to the flashing folder. When I press the power button, the computer does nothing, not even the fan spins. The only indication I have that it is on is the caps lock light turns on. I've tried resetting the pram, but the screen stays blank and does nothing. I don't have any ram modules in it, so it shouldn't be a ram problem.
View 11 Replies View RelatedI'm trying to fix my GF's Macbook Pro. This thing since day 1 has had so many little issues she's replacing it with a Dell. Anyhow, I want to try to fix the computer and I'm very good with computer hardware, just not familiar with troubleshooting Macs. The computer when turned on doesn't make a sound, it just sits at a blank screen with the power LED on the front lit solid. I have tried resetting the PRAM, resetting the SMC, and reseating the memory. I even swapped the memory.
It's the same behavior each time, just sits there, nothing comes on the screen. No noises. It does get quite warm sitting there powered on, though not obscenely hot. I can power it off with the power button as well. I have heard of trying to boot off of the restore CD or something but I feel that won't work and the problem is most likely hardware related. Nothing strange happened before this computer stopped working. It was not dropped, no water, or anything like that.
Specs are the machine is as follows:
15" Macbook Pro 2.2 Ghz Core 2 Duo, 2GB, 128MB VRAM, 120GB 5400 RPM Drive
From time to time, now, on my recently-acquired 2008 2.8x8 Mac Pro, it'll boot to a blank white screen, no Apple logo, no spinning indicator. It does not have Boot Camp set up. A single press of the power button will turn it off and it'll boot fine the immediately subsequent try. The console doesn't show anything.
View 4 Replies View RelatedAll of a sudden my 13" MacBook pro (2011) takes a long time to shut down. And on boot up it remains on a blank white screen where all I can do is move the mouse around. It may or may not boot to the desktop. At the moment I'm leaving it on sleep and it performs fine, apps load like normal but I'm afraid to shut it down incase it won't boot up again. The shut down takes so long that I need to hold the power button to shut it down. I've read around that it could be hardware failure but like I said I have it on sleep and it performs fine when I wake it.
Info:
MacBook Pro (13-inch Early 2011), Mac OS X (10.7.4)
My MBP 13" Retina just stopped rendering the screen. On boot, it chimes and the back light comes on but that's it. At first I thought it was non responsive, but when I connect an external monitor I can see that it works fine. It's just the primary display that doesn't render anything (only backlight with blank, black screen).
A few details worth knowing:
1) Last time I saw my primary display work, I had 10% battery left, I shut the lid. Next time I opened the lid, around 2 days later, it was just blank and backlit. I did a forced restart and from then on it only gave me a blank backlit black screen.
2) Works well if i boot it with an external monitor connected. when the chime comes on, I immediately shut the lid and use only the external display with external keyboard and mouse.
3) Video gets laggy when I use it on dual monitor mode (not the case before this problem happened). I boot up the macbook with an external display connected. No video on both screens. I have to login blindly before the second monitor gets video. Primary display still doesn't render anything, albeit showing a lighted blank black screen.
4) I've already tried resetting the PRAM. didn't work.
Info:
MacBook Pro, OS X Yosemite (10.10.1)
I've got a 15in aluminium powerbook, a couple of years old. So far I've had nearly everything go wrong with it. replaced screen, knackered hd, ram port failiure, and a battery that lasts 10 minutes.
I recently replaced the harddrive, as the standard issue one packed up a few times. I followed the instructions on ifixit.com website. To my delight I actually managed to do it, and the pb worked well for a few weeks. Then suddenly, the screen froze and faded to white. So far I've tried everything -
Resetting the pmu. Resetting the pram and nvram. Opened it up to check I reconnected everything.
and checked to see if the hd is still working starting it up from another computer, and it works fine. Everythings still there. Someone also said if you hold 'R' key down on start up it resets the lcd.
BUT STILL BLANK!!!!!!!!!
The screen still seems to turn black after a little while, indicating the energy saver is still on. I'm thinking I may have dislodged an lcd connection or something?
White MB about three years old. Was watching something on Hulu and HDD started making strange noises and screen froze. Forced reboot and only got white screen. Couldn't even get into single user mode. Got a new WD hard drive thinking it would fix the problem. Put in my backup of the Install Disk (lost the original like an idiot) but all it shows when I hold down the C key is a large blinking folder icon with a question mark on it. Still can't get into single user mode. I may have screwed up the backup of the Install Disk or am using the wrong DVD since I forgot to label it.
View 1 Replies View RelatedMy Macbook will not boot up. I am now faced with a plain grey screen with no apple logo, chime sound or activity wheel appearing.
Like most Macbook users I know, I rarely go through the booting up process from day to day use unless the System Updater requires a restart, but this time there was a different reason for me restarting the system.
When I was expanding an archive with Stuffit Expander, the app froze up. I went and deleted the archive file knowing that it was corrupt, but I did this too soon before the app had a chance to close down properly. It became stuck as a process that couldn't be closed down. Its dock icon didn't have a 'Force Quit' menu option so, I chose to perform a restart.
The Macbook went through the startup process but took a very long time. (I guess after reading around the forums this was fsck attempting to scan and repair the potentially damaged hard drive). I mistakenly performed a hard reboot thinking the system had hung.
The second time, it displayed the apple logo and wheel for about 2 minutes before showing a circle with a line through it and no further activity. When I rebooted again the apple logo and wheel were displayed with the hard drive activity audibly in a repetitive on and off state. I left this for about 15 minutes before deciding to turn it off. At the present moment it starts up to a plain grey screen as mentioned at the beginning. I tried experimenting with removing the extra 2gb memory module but there was no difference with or without it. I tried resting the NVRAM with Option-Command-P-R but all I got back was the startup chime (i.e. the muted volume I had it at has now reset to the default level).
When Option is held down on booting, the mouse cursor is visible over the same blank grey screen. No volumes show up. I have selected the Finder Preferences option to hide all volumes from showing up on the desktop, but I doubt this would affect volumes from showing up on the boot up screen.
I have tried booting from the 10.4 CD that came with the Macbook and the 10.5 (retail) DVD. The 'C' or 'D' keys do not have any effect either.
I think my options now are either to try and obtain a firmware reset CD which might make it possible to recognise volumes again, or there's the possibility that I'll have to get a new hard drive. Can you suggest anything else I might be able to try?
On the subject of hard drives, if it turns out that the Macbook's hard drive is beyond repair and I need a new drive I only have a caddy for 3.5" PATA drives which I use for Time Machine. With an appropriate 2.5" SATA caddy is there any way I could access the filesystem in Windows? How else could I format the drive to the correct FS?
Some weeks ago the screen on my iMac started to go blank. The only way to recover was to re-boot. The problem got worse until the machine became un-usable. I tried everything I knew, including switching off and unplugging to reset the pram as suggested, but eventually took it to the Apple Store where the 'expert' reset the pram the old way holding down the cmd/opt/p/r keys on startup. Problem solved (why do Apple give bad advice to clear the pram?).
Something had corrupted the software that drives the screen. The only program that I could think might have done that was ScreenRecycler which I have now stopped using. However, the problem has started to re-appear, the only new program I have used is Audirvana which being a music program should not affect the screen.
Info:
iMac, Mac OS X (10.7.4), printer, scanner, ATVs, external hard drives, USB DAC
I've got an 800Mhz iBook G4 (640MB RAM, latest update for Tiger 10.4) which has worked without a hitch for the last 2 years. Suddenly it has started going dead while in use - the screen goes completely blank (although the backlights are still on) and all sounds cease. It doesn't matter if the machine is idle, or playing World of Warcraft, or encoding a DVD in DVD Studio Pro. It is completely random. The only way to get out of it is to hold down the power button to force it to shut down. Powering up is also becoming difficult - 9 times out of 10 the machine boots but I get no startup sound. Instead the screen stays dark and the fan goes on full throttle, and nothing happens. Sometimes I can force it to shut down by holding down the power button, sometimes I need to take the battery out. When the machine does boot and I get back into OS X, sometimes it displays a message saying my clock and time/date are set before 2001 and I may have problems.
I understand this message comes up if you reset the power management unit, but on checking the time/date it is set correct. I have tried resetting the power management unit, but it doesn't make any difference. I have run the hardware test CD, and all items pass on the extended test. The iBook's battery is almost dead - this I know! But would that make any difference? With the time/date error that sometimes comes up on restart, it's almost like the internal battery that stores data like the time has run flat. Is this charged by the big battery? I haven't booted into open firmware, but I've read I can run the reset -nvram and reset-all commands from there (not sure what they do). It's not hardware, as the hardware test CD works. It doesn't seem to be a software error (although I haven't reinstalled OS X). Has my RAM gone bad or become unseated?
My 2002 iBook G3 notebook with OS X3.9 started acting up on me finally! 2 days ago I turned it on and it sounds like it is starting up normally, but when the screen comes on, it just stays lit up and black - I tried everything, from trying to adjust the brightness, to restarting it a zillion times to completely draining the battery and then restarting it again, nothing seems to work right! I thought it may be the backlight, but then the light does come on, and stays on - the apple logo on the back stays lit up even when I close the notebook.
View 1 Replies View RelatedSo my quicksilver has been working great up until this afternoon. i had to restart and now whenever i turn it on all i get is a blank grey screen and nothing else. i dont hear a startup chime or anything.
View 8 Replies View RelatedI did some reading online, and know that the flashing question mark basically means that there's either a problem with the OS installation or the hard drive itself. I borrowed a friend's Snow Leopard installation CD (mine didn't come with the CD) to try to boot from it, but it refuses to boot from the CD.
The only keyboard bootup control that does anything so far as I can tell is the alt key (using a windows keyboard), which results a long delay while booting, followed by a blank screen with a mouse cursor. Everything else just ends up with the flashing question mark. If I try to hold C to boot from the CD, it sits there for 3-4 minutes with the occassional CD whirring sound, then ejects the CD and goes to the flashing question mark.
I have had my g4 for about two years and all of a sudden the thing decided that it's not going to turn on anymore. Power is getting to the machine and a certain amount of whirring is heard but not the signature! as it starts. The screen remains blank and would stay like that all night if I let it. The only thing I did differently before this appeared was to take it to work in a different bag a few times. Rucksack before, Side bag (more vibration).
View 2 Replies View RelatedAfter packing away my little brothers sawtooth 400Mhz with 384mb RAM and an 8Mb ATI AGP graphics card and then unpacking it I've been having a problem. When starting the computer up the screen shows nothing at all I have tested to see if the screen is broken and it seems to be functional. I think the card itself might be broken? BTW, I'm using the VGA slot and not the DVI slot on the back. I have also removed and cleaned the card just incase that might've been the problem.
View 3 Replies View RelatedI purchased a used ibook from owc in January and have had it back to them twice for repairs. Lately, it stopped booting up again and they told me to use [URL] to take the mobo out and ship it to Arizona to have the solder refloated. I did and got it back, put it together and it would boot up, only to run for 15 minutes and shut down. Thinking I missed something, I dissasembled it today and reassembled it. Now it turns on with a blank screen, the fan runs on high, and it will go no further. I tried to reset the power manager, reset the p-ram, the hard drive is only a few months old and my brain is getting fried with frustration.
View 5 Replies View RelatedI have an iBook G4 1.07 GHz 30 gb 256 RAM with Panther. It was working fine until my HD got close to being full. Now I can't get it to boot past the Apple screen. It will either freeze there, or move on to the blue screen and freeze before the progress bar enters. I want to re-install Panther but I can't get any CD to boot during startup by holding "C", including the Panther OS CD, the Hardware Test CD, or the Tech Tool CD. I am able to boot to single user mode, where I type fsck -fy, and I recieve no errors with the hardware. I had this issue beore and my HD had to be replaced by Apple.
View 6 Replies View RelatedMy G3 b&w tower seems to have an intermittent problem with booting - every few times I go to boot there is no power. I have tried it with different power cord/socket etc but it seems to make no difference. Any ideas what this could be?
View 2 Replies View RelatedI have recently installed new RAM and an SSD in my late 2009 MacBook Pro, running OS X 10.6.8, and it now frequently hangs when I try to start it up. Here are details:
In recent weeks I noticed signs that seemed to point to a failing hard drive. I took the machine to a Genius Bar. The genius tried Disk Utility and a quick diagnostic and could not reproduce an error, but he noted many, many I/O errors recorded in a log file.
He said I probably had a failing disk, but it might be a cable issue. He gave me two options: leave the machine with Apple overnight to run diagnostics and perhaps repair if the problem was confirmed, or just take a chance and replace the drive myself, for less money and less downtime.
I went to a local computer store, and the salesman there noted that I was using relatively little disk space. He suggested that I swap my failing 160 G disk for a smaller, 120G solid-state drive, which happened to be on sale. I agreed and also bought some new RAM.
I installed the drive and RAM, partitioned the disk (with HFS journaling), and restored my files with Time Machine. For that day and the next, everything worked perfectly.
The second day after the installation, the system hung while starting up. The Apple logo appeared, the gray spinner appeared, and it just spun. I tried resetting PRAM. I tried safe restart. I started up from the install disk and ran Disk Utility: no problems found. I repaired permissions. I took out the new RAM and put back the old. In some cases after trying these steps, the system booted fine — once. In others, it would not boot the first time, but would boot on the second or third attempt. I reinstalled OS X and updated software. The problem persisted. I installed some freeware to enable trimming the new disk. No better.
I have booted many times in verbose mode. During the unsuccessful boots, there is usually a message "Bug: launchctl.c: 3557 (23930):6 ioctl(S6, SIO CAIFADOR_IN6, &ifra6) ! = -1". The next line is the command "fsck_hfs", and the machine hangs. Eventually it sometimes spits out "launchctl: please convert the following to launchd: /etc/mach_init.d/dashboardadvisory.plist". If I let it go for a long time, I sometimes come back to find a long string of I/O error messages, to the effect that media was expect to be there but wasn’t. I think every time I have gotten the launchctl message, it has booted successfully on the next try.
During the successful boots in verbose mode, everything happens so quickly that it is hard to say what is going on, but I don’t think it is running fsck_hfs. If it boots successfully and I give it a heavy I/O task, like doing a virus scan, everything works fine. If I run Disk Utility off the installation disk, it says the disk appears to be OK.
I started the machine in single user mode and ran fsck manually. It gave me reports similar to running Disk Utility, and told me the disk appeared to be OK. It then gave me the prompt for a new command. I typed "exit". It responded "logout". And hung.
One last thing: I just tried a couple of times to restart with the Apple Hardware test. Despite holding down the D key, the test failed to load, and after a long pause, the machine attempted a normal start-up.
Info:
MacBook Pro, Mac OS X (10.6.8)
so i go to turn my imac on tonight and it makes the normal noise when it always turns on but the screen stays blank(light blue)....after about 2 minutes this little picture of a folder with a question mark shows up in the middle of the screen. it keeps making this clicking noise as well. ive tried unplugging everything and restarting it here is a pic of what the thing that pop ups looks like [URL]
View 8 Replies View RelatedI have one of the 20" iMac G5's covered by the warranty extension for the intermittent shutdown problem. The problem is that I am out of the country, and where I am has very unreliable Apple service. It would be gone for weeks and weeks. I am considering flying back home to get my computer repaired. The computer shuts down multiple times a day without warning.
What are the chances I can find an AASP in the DC area who can do the repair in a day or two. I have read that the repair is only a power supply swap and can be done in 15 minutes. What do y'all think?
My other option is to just buy a new computer and worry about repairing this one in a year or two, which is a $2,000 hassle.
We have had a little powerbook G4 since about a year now. Such a great little stable machine that we have never had any problems with it. As a consequence, we still know little about it (usually I learn about machines/software by running into problems). Now, the wireless starts working intermittently. Sometimes it works fine and at other times it will not even indicate that our home network is present (whereas we have two other laptops (Win XP) that show that the network is active and has excellent strength). So at these times we are unable to re-connect. This started about two weeks ago and starts to get worse (it will more often not find it). Restarting does not work, but sometimes, when trying again the next day or a couple of hours later, it will work again. Should we just go ahead and get a new wireless card for the p-book?
View 7 Replies View RelatedI have a 17" MacBook Pro 2.16Ghz Core Duo with 10.6.2. I have an intermittent issue where half of the screen will go whitish with lines. A picture of my screen experiencing this is hosted at [URL]To return the screen to normal I simply have to close the screen and open it again.Unfortunately my AppleCare has expired, and my Apple tech is not sure of the cause. Any thoughts as to whether this is the screen, cable, or logic board.If it turns out to be the logic board, will the Core 2 Duo board fit into this case? If I have to replace the board anyway
View 2 Replies View RelatedThis is something I've been wondering for a long time. I seem to have a lot of screen-related issues with the Pros that I sit in front of in the main. Brightness controls going haywire displays not turning on, etc. There is also the odd attached USB device lockup, but I'd been putting this down to the devices themselves and the occasional, app-level instability of Leopard. More recently though, I've been seeing a pattern that's leading me to suspect the Pro's more than the peripherals. Is there a documented case of possible USB hub connection issues in (fully patched) 2008 Pros? The most frequent issue is monitors not behaving as expected when the system is booted until the monitors themselves are unplugged from power. There are also less frequent but present problems where iPods lock up, keyboards stop working, etc. I can't really abstract the problem down to an OS issue or a hardware issue, but the need for me to unplug the monitors seems to indicate that there is some sort of USB initialisation issue - as with the other minor problems I experience with other monitor-connected USB peripherals. Since I only use multimonitor environments as far as my Pros are concerned, all USB connections are usually made from the backs of the screens. So the big question is is this a screen USB hub fault, or a main-unit intermittent fault? All of the monitors I'm using have been to Applecare for one reason or another, although I'm not sure if they check everything in these repairs.
Can anyone else shed more light on this issue? It's pretty hard to replicate reliably and it's not been something I can go to Apple with any degree of certainty, yet the little minihoops I have with this problem (and oh so many other Apple issues, but that's by the by) irritate me immensely in comparison to my rock-solid, near-zero-such-issue, non-Apple environments which I also use daily.
MacBook Pro (15-inch, Mid 2010): Intermittent black screen or loss of video. I do hope they replace it.
View 7 Replies View RelatedI'm experiencing a intermittent screen scrambling on my MacBook 2 GHz Core Duo. It's a 3cm block which runs vertically down the screen and scrambles/inverts the colours in a flickering way.
View 1 Replies View RelatedMy November 2011 17" MacBook Proi has on several occasions gone to a black screen, which requires hard shutdown and re-boot. It happens in two ways: coming out of sleep, the screen appears for a second and then goes black, and sometimes when jjust using the Mac.
It comes back on after re-boot with no apparent problems but seems to be occuring more frequently, so I need to get this fixed.
Info:
MacBook Pro (17-inch), Mac OS X (10.7.3)
I have seen this talked about a fair bit, but i thought i'd start my own thread because it seems slightly different.
To start, when the computer was last running, the (what sounded like fan) started making a terrible noise, then stopped, and the computer turned off.
After that, when booting, it just goes to a grey/blue screen and sits there.
I have an iBook G4, 1064mhz, 256/30.
I dont know what model that makes it, but from the Mac website, I have tried to reset the PRAM to no avail. All of the methods listed do not seem to do anything on my ibook.
I tried using this link to reset the [URL]
I dont know which one is for my model, but i see no reset button under the keyboard, or on the case. There is a little tiny hole on the case beside the LCD???
I have tried the shift-ctrl-opt-power but it doesnt do anything.
As well, i did hold down the "option" button when booting, and it brings me to a screen which shows an image of a hard drive with a green "x"
I dont know if the green means good or the X means bad..
I have read that resetting PRAM and/or changing the resolution seem to help the problem, but I do not know how to do either.
