Macbook Pro 2011, white screen

[LongHairedSanta]

Hello there!

 

Last night I was on my Mac writing some notes when the screen goes white, the fans spin up and then the computer turns of. When I went to turn it on the screen looks like on the pictures, first stripes on the startup logo and then white ones it tries to boot into MacOS. 

 

It’s a late17 inch 2011 model.

The mods I’ve made is installed a 500gb SSD, 16gb of ram and repasted the cpu and gpu. 

 

My first guess is that the gpu is failing since the screen only have stripes on it on the initial boot-up and vanishes afterwards but I am just guessing. 

 

Id really appreciate if someone could shed som light on my situation and potential solutions.

 

Thanks in advance!

[Ashleyyyy]

yes, the gpu is dead. i have a Late 2011 15" and i managed to fix mine by only allowing it to run on the amd gpu. 

 

check out these 2 sources:

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/force-2011-macbook-pro-8-2-with-failed-amd-gpu-to-always-use-intel-integrated-gpu-efi-variable-fix.2037591/

https://realmacmods.com/macbook-2011-radeon-gpu-disable/

 

i did the efi fix from the macrumors thread, and i removed the resistor as shown on the realmacmods site AFTER THE EFI FIX. if you do that in the wrong order it won't work anymore. my amd gpu was still working so i did the macOS only steps on the macrumors site. that might not work for you because yours actually died. wether the efi fix worked for you is easy to see, if it boots up again it worked. 

 

you don't have to remove the resistor AFAIK, but the dGPU will still consume power. if battery life is not a great concern to you then you probably don't have to. in my case it killed my battery life so... 

 

a few things: 

if you do this, brightness control in macOS High Sierra will no longer work. 

 

also in High Sierra if you close the laptop and open it again the screen will be black and you have to restart the laptop to fix it. 

that can be avoided by selecting hibernate instead of sleep. 

in terminal when booted into macOS: sudo pmset -a hibernatemode 25

that will work except if you close it and then open it again really fast. 

 

the brightness control and sleep work fine in Linux. 

if you have Windows on it using bootcamp beware that Windows won't work anymore if you do this. it will bluescreen and/or will no longer boot. 

 

if you have any further questions feel free to ask me  

[LongHairedSanta]

On 1/26/2019 at 11:19 AM, firelighter487 said:

yes, the gpu is dead. i have a Late 2011 15" and i managed to fix mine by only allowing it to run on the amd gpu. 

 

check out these 2 sources:

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/force-2011-macbook-pro-8-2-with-failed-amd-gpu-to-always-use-intel-integrated-gpu-efi-variable-fix.2037591/

https://realmacmods.com/macbook-2011-radeon-gpu-disable/

 

i did the efi fix from the macrumors thread, and i removed the resistor as shown on the realmacmods site AFTER THE EFI FIX. if you do that in the wrong order it won't work anymore. my amd gpu was still working so i did the macOS only steps on the macrumors site. that might not work for you because yours actually died. wether the efi fix worked for you is easy to see, if it boots up again it worked. 

 

you don't have to remove the resistor AFAIK, but the dGPU will still consume power. if battery life is not a great concern to you then you probably don't have to. in my case it killed my battery life so... 

 

a few things: 

if you do this, brightness control in macOS High Sierra will no longer work. 

 

also in High Sierra if you close the laptop and open it again the screen will be black and you have to restart the laptop to fix it. 

that can be avoided by selecting hibernate instead of sleep. 

in terminal when booted into macOS: sudo pmset -a hibernatemode 25

that will work except if you close it and then open it again really fast. 

 

the brightness control and sleep work fine in Linux. 

if you have Windows on it using bootcamp beware that Windows won't work anymore if you do this. it will bluescreen and/or will no longer boot. 

 

if you have any further questions feel free to ask me  

Hello there!
First a big thanks for the help in getting me theese sources, really appreciated!

 

I am running into problems though since I am way out in deep dark territory that I know nothing about and don't really understand what i need to do. In the first link to macrumors i followed the instructions to remove the AMD drivers. But the Mac spits back lines like option not permitted and read-only. Then he talks about having the same problem and links to some other sources and things and this is where I don't dare doing anything. Do I need to remove the SSD and dongle it to my main PC? He talks about Linux. I am very lost. 

[Ashleyyyy]

@LongHairedSanta read the entire post first and then try it. If you don’t understand something i’ll try to explain it.