Mid 2010 MBP wont upgrade

[Gigawiz]

Hello to the Mac Help forums!



I have a bit of a dilemma with my Mid 2010 Macbook Pro. My brother gave me this mac (it was his old one) and it ran Mountain Lion when he had it. He removed the hdd before he gave it to me, and in the process, the HDD cable tore. The Optical drive was allready dead, so I decided to replace the drive with a 2nd hdd caddy, throw my own hdd in the caddy and run from that.



This is where the problems started for me. I tried to install mountain lion from my usb (made from the appstore installesd), and when booting, the apple logo & pinwheel would load, but then just freeze solid, no movement at all. So I asked my brother if that happened, and he said yes and that he needed to install snow leopard and upgrade from there. So, I grabbed the 10.6.3 usb disk from my old mid 2010 macbook air, and proceeded to install it. The install went great. I can use the OS and life was good. Then I decided that I actually wanted to use my purchased copy of Mountain Lion. The mac didnt like that. I tried to upgrade to 10.6.8, and the upgrade worked fine, but upon rebooting, it would freeze at the pinwheel screen. So, I booted in verbose mode, and this time it would get to the line "AirPort: Link down on en1. Reason 1 (Unspecified)" and just stop loading.



So, I contacted apple care. I was sent through resetting the NVRAM/PRAM, SMC and trying to boot with internet recovery. All of which failed and I was told to bring the machine to an apple store. So I did just that. At the apple store, they tried all the same things I was walked through, and even tried booting off of several of their own network drives (including a 'triage' drive), all of which got stuck at the pinwheel. The apple tech took the pc in the back, tried disconnecting my hdd caddy and removing one of the ram chips (not like I hadn't allready tried that) and stated that it wasn't those particular pieces of hardware that were causing it, but he noticed something on the motherboard that looked like a spill, and that he couldn't do anymore with it.



This particular spill happened before my brother got the mac. He was given the mac in an unbootable state, and was told if he could fix it, it was his. So he cleaned all of this mysterious, jelly like material, off of the motherboard and it worked perfectly for him in the 9 months that he had it.

Anyways, after leaving apple, I had to reseat the ram because the moron who took it in back didn't seat it right, or check that the mac was in the same state as when he got it, and today I started noticing problems with the hdd (which I had not had before visiting apple). So I put a new hdd in, reinstalled SL and have been running on that. I decided for the 'lulz' to try and boot Internet Recovery in verbose mode, and to my surprise it worked!

I watched the verbose messages, and the mac gets to the following line before freezing:

using 64-bit bootcache playlist BootCacheControl: Unable to open /var/db/BootCache.playlist: 2 No such file or directory
Previous Shutdown Cause: 3 SMC::smcHandleInterruptEvent WARNING status=0x0 (0x40 not set) notif=0x0 
SMC::smcInitHelper ERROR: MMIO regMap == NULL - fall back to old SMC mode ***** 
[BroadcomBluetoothHostControllerUSBTransport][start] -- Completed -- this = 0xffffff802441cc00 NVDAStartup: Official 
NVDANV50HAL loaded and registered

after that, it just sits there and looks at me like I'm stupid. I'm not sure whats causing this thing to fail, or why, after my brother had Mountain Lion on it for the past 9 months, that it fails to boot into even the mountain lion installer now.

Mac Specs:
13" Macbook Pro, Mid 2010 (7,1 I believe)
Core 2 Duo @ 2.4ghz
8gb DDR3 Ram
Nvidia GeForce 320m (256mb)
250gb Toshiba 5400rpm HDD
Snow Leopard 10.6.3

Any input is greatly appreciated.

-Gigawiz

 

[oldscribe]

Hi and welcome,

I tried to install mountain lion from my usb (made from the appstore installesd), and when booting, the apple logo & pinwheel would load, but then just freeze solid, no movement at all.

You could try this,
1) Shut down the Macbook Pro and start it again (pressing ALT and selecting your OS X boot drive manually.
2) Also you could try clearing out the launch services database.
To reset the LS database you run this one-liner in the Terminal.app (copy & paste):

*/System/Library/Frameworks/CoreServices.framework/Versions/A/Frameworks/LaunchS ervices.framework/Versions/A/Support/lsregister -kill -r -domain local -domain system -domain user*

Then restart.

Not sure if this will solve your issue, as it sounds like a hardware issue.

 

[Morhass]

One of the problems with liquid spills is slow corrosion... I've seen laptops work for over a year after a diet coke spill, then when they failed, found that many of the connectors on the logic board had been eaten away to the point where they were literally falling of the board. Combined with its other misadventures, like the torn HD cable, there's probably more than one hardware issue. If the machine won't boot from a known-good external boot drive, it's probably cheaper to give up on it!