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Model A1297 Unibody: Early 2009, Mid 2009, Mid 2010, Early 2011 & Late 2011

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17" MacBook Pro won't start!

Normally it acts like it wants to boot:

Grey Apple & Progress Bar that goes on about the first third of the way and then

either goes white forever (never shows anything expect a white screen) or it drops

to black with a little chunk noise and does it all again but still never goes beyond

the white. I've reseated and swapped out the memory, done the SMC reset; and even

taken the hard drive out and booted up my MACPRO with it in a USB adapter box (nothing seems wrong with the hard drive).

It "will" start up in Single User Mode and I ran FSCK on it which didn't help!

It's got El Capitan on it.

Oh, I also tried to start up from another external hard drive I have with 10.9 on it (but maybe that's too old).

Answer this question I have this problem too

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3 Comments

If you have Diskwarrior try running that.

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Had you just done a system upgrade?

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Someone updated to El Capitan whenever it first showed up; this is a teacher's computer and we don't put hands on it unless something is wrong.

I'm not current on Diskwarrior (not since they stopped shipping on disks) and I'm paying for it out of my pocket so I'd just as soon not do that until after the first of the year.

I don't see how it could be the hard drive or software when the same drive will boot my desktop MacPro and passes all the tests (sorry I didn't say that).

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To use Recovery Mode, reboot or start your Mac and hold the Command and R keys simultaneously on your keyboard as soon as you hear the familiar startup chime. Keep holding as your Mac boots, which may take a few moments depending on its specific configuration. You can let go of the keys when you see a screen . Run Disk utilities. Run reinstall system.

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Thanks for the answer but I tried this and the same blank white screen is the result! I know the Recovery Partition is good because I booted up on it after I booted up on the regular partition with my Macpro!

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If you know the hard drive is good, it might be the hard drive cable. I'm assuming that 10.9 Hard Drive was a known good one, and that should work. Replacing the hard drive cable would be your next step.

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Boot the computer into the recovery partition (hold Command + R during boot) and run Disk Utility. In disk utility run a verify on the hard drive and see what results you get. If that comes back bad, try to run the repair. If it is unable to repair the disk, I would backup your data and then reinstall MacOSX.

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Very good answer but a minute slow.

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Ya I was sad. :)

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That happens sometimes ;-) here's an up vote for the effort.

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Try replacing the hard drive cable

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