2017 air I've trouble shot the heck out of

[Egogoo]

I've been troubleshooting a 2017 Mac Air for entirely too long, and I feel that I may be bested by this conundrum that I'm facing.

My problem lies in the fact that originally, my charger worked. I unfortunately formatted the system and put linux on it thinking nothing about it, then of course realizing the error in my ways I had to do the internet recovery in order to put the system back to factory.

Now this is where my problem surfaced. After formatting the drive, the light stopped coming on on the charger, and I can't for the life of me make the system charge. I can get about 10-15 seconds of regular boot sequence then the power cuts. The SMC seems fine, and reads "2.27f2" in the system report.

I don't understand because everything seems to be in order, and what makes it worse is that I'm almost 100% on the fact that it's software not hardware.

I can make the Mac boot by holding the power button, then connecting the charger, and thusly releasing the power button 5 seconds later, in which I get a high speed fan boot. This boot-up being fully functional, nothing at all wrong except high speed fans, which are obnoxious.

The thing that is stranger than anything else is the fact that I connected a friends charger, which was the correct wattage and model, and upon first hookup, it glowed green. Reflecting the fact that when I boot the system normally, during the 15 seconds time I have before it cycles, the top right notification shows the battery to be at 100%. I then disconnected his charger tried mine, to no avail. Then flipped back to his and NOTHING. It acted like my charger, having come into contact once with my machine.

Regardless, thank you to anyone who reads this and potentially has some input because I'm stumped. I'm generally very good with this sort of thing, and I can count on one hand the times I've thrown in the towel.

THANKS!

 

[Cory Cooper]

Hi,

-Do you have OS X/macOS installed at all?
-Did you have to "hack" EFI to install only Linux?
-Is your charger an Apple OEM 45 watt that came with the MacBook Air?
-What model is your friend's Mac, and what wattage is his charger?

First things I would try are:
-How to reset the SMC of your Mac
-Reset NVRAM or PRAM on your Mac

See if those resets correct the issue.

C

 

[Egogoo]

Okay! So I have all the answers. Haha. Pardon the delay, but thank you IMMENSELY for the response.

Model Name: MacBook Air
Model Identifier: MacBookAir7,2
Processor Name: Intel Core i5
Processor Speed: 1.8 GHz
Number of Processors: 1
Total Number of Cores: 2
L2 Cache (per Core): 256 KB
L3 Cache: 3 MB
Hyper-Threading Technology: Enabled
Memory: 8 GB
Boot ROM Version: 195.0.0.0.0
SMC Version (system): 2.27f2

1.That might help with the clarification. I am running OS X Mojave. Having utilized the internet recovery for out-of-the-box factory restoration to FINALLY get out of that 64bit incarceration they call Catalina.

2.The "hack" word is so sparingly used in my vernacular, and mostly in jest, I am actually not certain as to what you mean by hack the EFI. I inserted a Manjaro Live Pen, loaded boot options using the option button, and ran the wizard, then using gparted, I erased all partitions, initialized a new partition table and went from there. Which, until reboot, looked fantastic. Haha!!

3.My charger is OEM 45watt for sure. Made that mistake. &#@*&^% Best Buy... I know better too which makes it worse.

4.My friend's Mac is also an 13" air. Roughly being about the 2014-15 mark. Also, 45watt charger with the "T" shape to the connector.

I have reset the S.M.C. in SO many different lengths, key orders, keyboard sides, stroke counts, etc, You name it, I have sincerely tried it. There's quite a bit of rabble out there about this sort of thing, so I gave everything a shot.

I don't seem to get anything out of the NVRAM reset as well. It does seem to work based on the resets and the "CRT television"-like shutdown of the screen when the sequence is recognized by the boot loader.

The S.M.C. seems fine, in fact, and this is incredibly strange, if I regularly shutdown within the HFM (high fan mode for brevity) that I can manage booting in, upon hitting the power button from full power down (still with the plug attached) it defaults to the HFM and stays within previous parameters, in which no battery is found at all, but all systems aside are fully operational.

Now when I do the same thing, except during shutdown I use the L-hand side CTL:OPTION:SHIFT+Power, I get a completely different result. It starts to boot normally as if I'd plugged the charger in from dead. The loop that occurs is on average about the length it takes to get to the drive decryption page and enter your password only to loop back around. At this juncture, the system is now recognizing the battery and it shows fully charged.

Apologies, brevity isn't my strong suit, but thank you once again for your time.

There aren't partitions that are required on an oem manufacture part table that the SMC requires, similar to the two partitions created by the Microsoft installer in-between the EFI and the root drive?

 

[Egogoo]

Okay! So I have all the answers. Haha. Pardon the delay, but thank you IMMENSELY for the response.

Model Name: MacBook Air
Model Identifier: MacBookAir7,2
Processor Name: Intel Core i5
Processor Speed: 1.8 GHz
Number of Processors: 1
Total Number of Cores: 2
L2 Cache (per Core): 256 KB
L3 Cache: 3 MB
Hyper-Threading Technology: Enabled
Memory: 8 GB
Boot ROM Version: 195.0.0.0.0
SMC Version (system): 2.27f2

1.That might help with the clarification. I am running OS X Mojave. Having utilized the internet recovery for out-of-the-box factory restoration to FINALLY get out of that 64bit incarceration they call Catalina.

2.The "hack" word is so sparingly used in my vernacular, and mostly in jest, I am actually not certain as to what you mean by hack the EFI. I inserted a Manjaro Live Pen, loaded boot options using the option button, and ran the wizard, then using gparted, I erased all partitions, initialized a new partition table and went from there. Which, until reboot, looked fantastic. Haha!!

3.My charger is OEM 45watt for sure. Made that mistake. &#@*&^% Best Buy... I know better too which makes it worse.

4.My friend's Mac is also an 13" air. Roughly being about the 2014-15 mark. Also, 45watt charger with the "T" shape to the connector.

I have reset the S.M.C. in SO many different lengths, key orders, keyboard sides, stroke counts, etc, You name it, I have sincerely tried it. There's quite a bit of rabble out there about this sort of thing, so I gave everything a shot.

The S.M.C. seems fine, in fact, and this is incredibly strange, if I regularly shutdown within the HFM (high fan mode for brevity) that I can manage booting in, upon hitting the power button from full power down (still with the plug attached) it defaults to the HFM and stays within previous parameters, in which no battery is found at all, but all systems aside are fully operational.

Now when I do the same thing, except during shutdown I use the L-hand side CTL:OPTION:SHIFT+Power, I get a completely different result. It starts to boot normally as if I'd plugged the charger in from dead. The loop that occurs is on average about the length it takes to get to the drive decryption page and enter your password only to loop back around. At this juncture, the system is now recognizing the battery and it shows fully charged.

Apologies, brevity isn't my strong suit.

EDIT: Upon retrying the NVRAM bit, I have literally no response in the HFM. It loads impervious to the input entirely. I also forgot that within the HFM it doesn't have the key lights on, whilst in boot loop showing battery available and all, they are very much on. Don't know if that tidbit helps.

 

[friendlyxo]

The S.M.C. seems fine, in fact, and this is incredibly strange, if I regularly shutdown within the HFM (high fan mode for brevity) that I can manage booting in, upon hitting the power button from full power down (still with the plug attached) it defaults to the HFM and stays within previous parameters, in which no battery is found at all, but all systems aside are fully operational.

What you're referring to is SMC bypass. The system will remain in SMC bypass mode (SMC is not utilised, all sensors are disabled, fan will run at 100%) until you perform an SMC reset.

Now when I do the same thing, except during shutdown I use the L-hand side CTL:OPTION:SHIFT+Power, I get a completely different result. It starts to boot normally as if I'd plugged the charger in from dead.

This is SMC reset (referred to in schematics as LSOC RST) - Left Shift, Option, Command, Power. It performs the same function as if you had removed the charger and battery, and plugged it back in.

I don't know if your issue was resolved but you may have a board issue here.