kylos

After recently replacing the hd in my 15" Core Duo Macbook Pro, I've experienced a few hardware difficulties followed by now not being able to boot at all.

At first, I noticed the internal speakers were not functioning and the screen would occasionally go black, unable to be recovered without a hard restart.

Now, it won't start at all. It will power up and the cd drive will attempt to load a disk and the sleep light illuminates dimly, but nothing else happens. Even a PRAM reset won't restart the computer as expected. I've taken it apart to recheck connections, but without success. SMC reset does nothing as well.

So my question is, what component is the most likely culprit? I don't want to be swapping part by part until I find the problem.

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I don't have any photos, but you'd know if you were missing a tab. Along each side of your macbook pro, there are 4 screws that hold the top plate in place. The top plate has corresponding tabs, which are fragile and can break off if you're not gentle enough. I broke the front tabs on both sides (I think they had already been weakened due to bumps those corners have received. The tab on the hard drive side fell into the hard drive bay and under the logic board. If you're missing a tab, the cover will be somewhat loose and you won't be able to reinstall the screw.

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My problem turned out to be mechanical in nature. One of the mounting tabs holding the top cover in place had broken off and fallen underneath the left IO board (I thought the part had fallen out of the computer). Removing the tab fixed the boot issue, but the speakers still don't work; external audio, however, does work. I think the tab may have short-circuited something and fried the speaker circuit. I'm just fortunate that nothing else appears to be damaged.

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