Solved! MacBook Pro - Dead?

[itsjones573]

I’ll acknowledge there may be nothing that can be done- my MacBook Pro is from 2011 (8 years old, though it got a new battery sometime in its first four years) and it’s been years since I okay’ed the updates it kept auto pushing. It’s been fussy for awhile now (connection to charging cord is fragile, needs to be restarted often, applications crash frequently) so its not exactly a surprise.

BUT if anyone does have any advise, I’d greatly appreciate it!

Here’s the situation:

Last night when I opened my laptop, it wouldn’t turn on. I checked the indicator lights on the side and it had almost no battery so I charged it.

Once half the indicator lights went on, I opened it again. Screen was black- sometimes if it totally looses charge it has to be rebooted so whatever. I hold the power button down, it makes the reboot noise, the apple logo comes up and the progress bar starts loading... And then the screen goes black again.

It does this every time I reboot it- usually there’s about 20 seconds where it seems like it’s working before it dies again. I tried the tips here and had no luck with the different key commands suggested, and am having trouble finding other help pages that seem applicable to this situation.

According to the indicator lights on the side of the laptop and on the charging cord, the laptop is now fully charged and my results are the same whether it’s still plugged into the charger or not.

I’m looking for advise on:

1. How to get it to start so I can make sure I get everything I want from it onto a hard drive

2. Is continuing to experiment with it (essentially rebooting it continuously) going to ultimately do it and/or the stuff on it more damage than good?

 

[hang-the-9]

You may not get it to start without replacing hardware, RAM, motherboard, maybe hard drive. You should be able to get your files out from it with using an external enclosure and connecting the drive to another computer, as long as you did not encrypt the drive.

About the thing getting worse the more you try things, yes that can happen. If it will for sure or not there is no way to know, but it's a possibility.