Power light turns on but screen remains black. No chime.

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MacBook Pro 15" Unibody Early 2011

Model A1286. Released February 2011 / 2.0, 2.2, or 2.3 GHz Quad-core Intel Core i7 Processor

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Ajacobson @ajacobson3628

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Posted: Dec 6, 2015

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Power light turns on but screen remains black. No chime.

This has been happening intermittently for the last month or so.

Sometimes, when the screen goes into sleep mode the keyboard will remain backlit. When I press a button or click to bring it out of sleep mode the computer will be unresponsive. My only option from there has been to hard reset the computer. Usually this works, but sometimes, on reset, the computer will power on (I can hear the optical drive sound, fans, and see the power light) but remain at a black screen. It does not chime.

I have tried smc resets, pvram resets, booting into recovery, and booting into safe mode. All are unresponsive. I also used the apple hardware diagnostic and it passed (mine and at an apple service center). I updated the ram to 8gigs and the hard drive to an ssd(trim is enabled) over 6 months ago.

The computer is running El Capitan and I'm usually running rails console or IPython when it crashes (though I'm running those most of the time).

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mayer @mayer

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MacHale Enterprises

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Posted: Dec 7, 2015

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This sounds like a recall issue. Take it in to an Apple Store or ASP and have the test run: https://www.apple.com/support/macbookpro...

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That was my initial reaction/hope but I did take it to an ASP and it passed the gpu test. I tried AHT on my own as well and everything keeps passing.

Dec 7, 2015 by Ajacobson

First see if it does it in SafeMode (start up with the shift key held down. That failing I would next replace the hard drive cable and drive. I am surprised that it passed the video test.

Dec 7, 2015 by mayer

Ya I was pretty shocked too. It's a pretty intermittent issue though. I would have to run it in safe mode for about a week to be sure. I haven't been able to figure out what, if any, user actions are triggering the crash

Dec 8, 2015 by Ajacobson

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That was my initial reaction/hope but I did take it to an ASP and it passed the gpu test. I tried AHT on my own as well and everything keeps passing. — Ajacobson
First see if it does it in SafeMode (start up with the shift key held down. That failing I would next replace the hard drive cable and drive. I am surprised that it passed the video test. — mayer
Ya I was pretty shocked too. It's a pretty intermittent issue though. I would have to run it in safe mode for about a week to be sure. I haven't been able to figure out what, if any, user actions are triggering the crash — Ajacobson