Rather than shell out to fix a 6 year old Macbook, I decided to have done and buy something future-proof, as a mates Mac Pro 1.1 has suffered the same death as my 2008 MBP. I splashed out on a 2011 'Sandy Beach' series unibody 2.0ghz i7. This was eating through 10.9.3 and running perfectly, until 10.9.4 came along that is...
Immediately after updating to 10.9.4 I noticed that iPhoto would crash the machine when it detected my iPhone being plugged in. iPhoto works fine with no iPhone connected and with iPhoto closed, the iPhone interacts with iTunes and charges. Inevitably, I plugged the iPhone in again while iPhoto was running. The screen turned to a purple pattern and needed a forced reset. After that it won't boot at all, just loads the initial Apple-logo, spinning-wheel and chime, but then just hangs on a blank grey screen.
I have started 2 threads about this on the Apple Community forum, but so far all poeple can come up with is the predictable "get hold of the original install disk that came with your Mac" type answers, sigh, so I may be better off reposting to MacTech or MacMod.
As I see thousands of people are having the same Mac-killing issues with Mavericks, even up into the Retina models, I can safely assume this is the same fault that has killed both my Macbooks, even if the symptoms differ slightly. 2 unrelated hardware fails in 5 weeks? Coincidence I think not!
Course of action 2011 i7 Sandy Beach:
Apple-logo / spinning-wheel / chime load, but then just goes to grey screen.
Safe-mode loads the progress bar, but then goes to the same grey-screen.
Recovery-partition does not work, just goes to a solid blue-screen.
Booting from a Snow Leopard dual-layer install DVD does not work, just grey-screen.
Booting from a Lion single-layer install DVD does not work, just grey-screen.
Clearing the PRAM / VRAM, even 3 times at once, does not have any effect.
Resetting SMC has no effect.
I have tried both sticks of RAM, independently, in both slots. This has no effect.
I swapped in a HDD from a 2008 MBP running Mavs 10.9.3. This gives the same grey-screen, though this HDD is from an MBP that also stopped working under Mavs and may be corrupted.
The only step left to take is to try a new store-bought blank HDD and see if that will boot from an OS X install DVD.
If that doesn't work, I have read that a failed HDD-cable can cause this problem - even at £16 I think this is not worth trying.
It may be worth trying to remove the battery and force a complete reset of the hardware.
If the HDD or cable is not the fault then I assume it is the graphics-card that has somehow malfunctioned under Mavs and it will need to go into the Apple store, nightmare. They will only say it needs a new logic-board, integrated graphics and all that jazz, so it may just be worth biting the bullet and just replacing the LB myself. Wish someone could say this would fix it for sure!
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Course of action 2008 Core2Duo Penrhyn:
Macbook hard crashing all the time, then taking 3 or 4 attempts to reboot into OS X.
Clearing PRAM / VRAM got the thing booted, but had no effect after that.
Safe-mode worked, but had no effect on the symptoms.
Recovery-partition worked, I reinstalled OS X over the top and this had no effect.
It stopped booting completely after this, the only way to get it booted was to either drop the battery out while it was running, or pull the HDD cable off the logic-board while it was running.
I backed up using Disk Utility in recovery, then erased the entire System partition and reinstalled a fresh OS X Mavs, this worked until the following day when the same symptoms returned.
I booted using a Lion install DVD [single-layer] and erased the entire HDD of all volumes and created a new one. Lion booted and restarted ok, so I assumed the problem to be Mavericks. Sadly, later the same day, the crashes and reboot problems returned.
2 days later the Macbook will not even power up, just a low fan noise and then it shuts down.
No method of hard-reset or power-supply will revive it.
