2009 Mackbook Pro stuck on start up screen.

[bigboy529]

Hi all
A friend brought me his 2009 MacBook Pro to see if I can get it working, one morning it simply didn't want to turn on, this was around a week ago.
It turns on, shows the Apple loading screen but no start up chime, then it just stays there and doesn't do anything.
If I turn it on I can hear the obtical drive doing its thing as you could on the older Mac's, but I'm not sure if I can hear the hard drive spinning or whether I'm hearing something else make a humming noise.

* I tried resetting the NVRAM, while doing that it at least restarts and then gives the chime, I tried a couple of times but it then just stucks at the load screen again.
* I tried resetting the SMC, but that also doesn't help.
* It doesn't want to boot in to recovery mode.

Any other ideas? Thing is, he doesn't have backups of anything on this machine, as in not a single thing.

 

[Pho3nix]

Remove hard drive and test to see if it boots

 

[bigboy529]

Remove hard drive and test to see if it boots

My next step is to open it up, before I remove the hard drive I'll just reseat the RAM first, Google suggests that's also a possible solution.

 

[Sinbad]

It's a fake judging by the spelling in the topic. After all, noone expects a Rollex to keep good time...

 

[mev]

Hi all
A friend brought me his 2009 MacBook Pro to see if I can get it working, one morning it simply didn't want to turn on, this was around a week ago.
It turns on, shows the Apple loading screen but no start up chime, then it just stays there and doesn't do anything.
If I turn it on I can hear the obtical drive doing its thing as you could on the older Mac's, but I'm not sure if I can hear the hard drive spinning or whether I'm hearing something else make a humming noise.

* I tried resetting the NVRAM, while doing that it at least restarts and then gives the chime, I tried a couple of times but it then just stucks at the load screen again.
* I tried resetting the SMC, but that also doesn't help.
* It doesn't want to boot in to recovery mode.

Any other ideas? Thing is, he doesn't have backups of anything on this machine, as in not a single thing.

If you can't get it working, I have an old Macbook Pro (i7) that I'd like to sell while it's still worth something... PM me.

 

[bigboy529]

It's a fake judging by the spelling in the topic. After all, noone expects a Rollex to keep good time...

Haha just spotted that now, don't know how I managed to get a K in there.

 

[snorbaard]

Haha just spotted that now, don't know how I managed to get a K in there.

Try turning it on while holding the CMD+S buttons to boot into single-user (verbose) mode. It should spit out a lot of text helping you see where it gets stuck.