Chosen Solution
Hello I was offered the above described MBP at a fair price with the hint, it may be defect / broken. The current owner told me, that a SSD was inserted and after a while the MBP does not boot any longer - it is just showing blinking question mark. I advised to hold down option after powering up the MBP and he told me, then 3 beeps can be heard and nothing happens ( more or less ). He agreed that little bit of water was spilled on the MBP, but it was running without any problems until last week or so. I would assume logic board is broken or is on its way to !&&*, but maybe someone has an idea on this failure. I am working on servers and I have seen a lot of times RAM modules failing after a couple of years and I have read about weal and broken HDD cables especially in 13" MBPs. So, any suggestion? Should I take it? Thanks in advance, Stone
First the three beeps are bad RAM. Replace it first, then the HD/IR cable and drop in a test hard drive and you may be just fine. Test all the keys before buying to see if they have been shorted out.
I would try booting up with a bootable external drive. Does that work? If it does then you know the issue is the internal drive or the SATA cable. Without isolating things down its a pig in a poke problem. I would not pay much as you could be getting a looser of a system.
Hi Thanks for your replies. Why I am asking? It ’s not that I am not feeling familiar with such “repairs” or that I do not know much about computer stuff in general, but I always like to hear a second or third opinion. In this case I am wondering about the 3 beeps while pressing option key during power up of the MBP - according to Apple this indicates “bad banks” of RAM, which I like to interpret as bad RAM modules, not properly fitted modules or - worst case - broken RAM slots. The question mark indicates - according to Apple - that the boot signature / boot device cannot be found; this might be broken disk, a “dying” disk, a bad cable or - worst case - a faulty controller. I also assumed to boot from an external drive, but this will only show if the system (hardware) can be booted, but the onboard HDD controller is not involved IMHO and also not the internal cable (so both parts can still be faulty). So - finally - my question is if somebody knows if the onboard HDD controller is always involved in disks operations (but AFAIK USB disks do have their own controller) and if the 3 beeps are indicating broken slots (most times) or faulty, bad fitted RAM modules. I can imagine that the system won’t boot up because of faulty RAM modules, too. Regards, Stone
Hi Got the MBP and it seems to be pretty easy. I opened it and first thing I noticed is sand inside the MBP; I removed the RAM modules and blew away the dust from the banks and their contact pins. As the RAM modules do not have a sticker with a known manufacturer (just an “M” on it), I looked up some modules I had stored as spare parts. They are not of the same manufacturer, but of the same type mainly (10600) and so I installed on of them at first. The MBP booted from USB drive - perfect. I turned it off and installed the second one. It booted again. Perfect. No beeps anymore (I tried it with the old modules and the same moment I had pressed option key I could not even switch on the MBP … everytime I pressed on/off it started to beep immediately). So I put back the SSD I removed with the modules at first and the MBP booted from USB drive by itself, recognizing the SSD. I started disk utility and I could see that only 200 MB were used - so I assume, someone installed the new modules and also the SSD at the same time, started an installation, but the installation failed because of the misbehaving RAM modules and everything ended up in a non-installed, but labeled SSD. At the moment I am installing Mavericks … :-) Will keep you updated. Regards, Stone
