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Question

What's wrong with my macbook?

by Jul 2, 2015 8:19PM PDT

I have a macbook pro, the model # is A1278.

Some background:

This was my daughter's laptop, she left it here when she left for college. I finally booted it up but it would only boot to a blank white screen, so I ran apple's mac resource inspector on it and it was showing that there was a problem reading the HDD.

So I replaced the HDD with a new one from best buy and turned it back on only to get the same white screen. At this point, I decided to replace the HDD cable as well, so I ordered one and replaced my current one. Now the laptop boots to the folder with the question mark on it.

I know that it makes sense to see this since I haven't yet installed the OS on the new HDD, however, I cannot boot off of my flash drive or CD with an OS on it.

I've tried resetting PRAM, doing the Command + R OSX installer, booting into safe mode, however when I try to use any of these boot keys other than N, I just get a blank white screen again.

At this point, I'm leaning heavily towards a jacked up logic board, but I wanted some others' opinions. Thoughts?

Discussion is locked

3 Posts
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Answer
Or the optical drive is gone too.
by Forum moderator Jul 2, 2015 11:08PM PDT

Clean the lens, retest then swap in a new ODD.

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Not the ODD
by Blueberrybagel Jul 3, 2015 11:40AM PDT

There is nothing wrong with the ODD that I am aware of. Like I said, I even used a USB with the operating system on it. The problem is not that the media is not being read, it's that I cannot load into boot option by holding down option, C, or command + R. When I try that, I only get a blank white screen.

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Then the news is grim.
by r. proffitt Forum moderator Jul 3, 2015 1:51PM PDT

That points to connection to/from the ODD or a bad motherboard. Let me be clear. I won't write long winded texts when it's failing like that. I would however remove the ODD since you had USB for a test.

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