Dead Mac Walking
My MacBook Pro had a near death experience today.
Whilst putting the finishing touches to a Keynote presentation the spinning beachball of doom showed up, uninvited. And never left. Total UI lockup - machine completely unresponsive - time for a hard reset.
Now this is where things started to get really worrying. After resetting, I hit the power button to start the machine up again. Startup chime… display lit up… grey background… and…
nothing
No apple logo, no spinner, no OS X. I tried resetting a few more times, removed the battery, held down the power button to reset the System Management Controller but to no avail. Later that day I tried rebooting again, and just left it sitting there at the blank grey screen. 5 minutes later, the Apple logo showed up. minutes later again, the spinner arrived. OS X then s l o w l y sprang to life (I’m talking about 15 mins for the OS to load).
Rebooted again, this time from the Install disk to run a disk check. Disk Utility reported no errors following a verify of the Mac HD. Rebooted once more and everything had miraculously returned to the land of the living. No signs of any problems having ever existed. Very puzzling.
The worrying thing is that I’m now left with a problem. Take the MBP into the repair shop and they’ll undoubtedly just tell me the machine is working perfectly - which it is. Do nothing and it’s surely just a matter of time before this particular gremlin raises his head again.
4 years ago