As detailed in the post over there, a friend had an issue with MacBook pro with the GPU AMD failing. A few months later it wouldn’t even boot. Couldn’t even get it into single user mode.
So, how did I get it working again. Well first of all I had a USB stick with a non-GUI version of Linux, I used ArchLinux. I won’t go into the details here, but I did have issues copying the ISO of ArchLinux onto a USB stick using my own Mac. You can see how I did this here.
WARNING – these worked for me, they may not work for you, ensure you take a full back up before performing any of these tasks, the read only disk image will be faster, but the read-write is better, it still took me two days to perform a backup for a 500GB disk. If your Time Machine is available, use that. The author of CheekyFactor.com will not be held liable for loss of data or broken machines. Do not perform these tasks if you are a novice.
OK, now to get this MacBook pro working again. Stick the USB disk in with ArchLinux on into the MacBook pro.
Power on the machine, ideally it needs to have the power cable attached to the machine. As soon as you hit power, press down the alt key at the same time.
Ensure you have the top item selected for ArchLinux and press e. As you can see at the bottom of this image you will see a line, at the end of that line add nomodeset and hit enter.
What we are interest in is those GPU lines in the bottom left hand corner, they may not necessarily be there, you just need to look for something like this. But don’t worry if you can’t see them.
This will look something like this.
In theory, we can now reboot, type in reboot. Initially I had issues booting, it got stuck and kept restarting. So I booted into recover mode by holding down command and R down on boot.
In theory, if you have done everything correctly, you should now have a working MacBook Pro.
BUT, please have in mind, this is not a permanent fix. When you upgrade or if you need to reset the SMC or NVRAM you will get the same error and you will need to perform the tasks above again.
I just hope this is a better solution than what was shown in method 1 which kept failing without the SMC or NVRAM being reset.
There is a permanent solution I have found on YouTube, but due to knowing how bad I am at soldering, I think I will pass on that one. But if you want to look at the permanent solution check this out.
But if you do that, you are on your own.
Job done. You should now have a working ArchLinux USB stick.
So a friend has an issue with an issue where his MacBook Pro late 2011 was not booting. Looking at the issue and finding information online, it turns out the AMD card seems to fail on MacBook Pros. But thankfully it can be programatically bypassed.
A lot of information I was finding insisted on using ArchLinux. I did get ArchLinux booting on a Surface Pro Virtual Box, but just couldn’t get it working on the Mac, it just kept either not recognising that boot media was inserted into the USB or CD drive. I also tried using Gentoo, but I couldn’t get passed the Grub.
But eventually I sussed it out.
This is a short video of what it was like, sped up, to what it looked like once it was up and running. When I first attempted to boot up before it failed it took six minutes to reboot, once the changes had been made it booted in less than a minute.
The machine should now boot normally.
A few months later the same machine had the same issue, even having issues booting. So, after looking on Google, I found a new way of fixing the issue, hopefully it will be a more permanent fix, you can see how I did this over here.
This may be pushing an open door here, but recently I had a dispute with a company. I was dealing with the MD for that company, eventually the police were involved, but the issue I had wasn’t really about that, it was the fact that the person I had been dealing with had the same first name as my business partner. That bit will remain between my partner and I.