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So my Late 2012 Macbook Pro 13” Retina works just fine on my existing logic board EXCEPT the charging circuit is whacked so that it never will charge the battery. If you put a charged battery in, everything is great until you run out of power. I originally thought it was the MagSafe board or battery but have swapped both with identical results. So I ordered, received and installed a replacement logic board from IFIXIT. When I plug it into power, after going green then amber on the charge cable, it plays the reboot tone (which is weird, why does it jump right to life without input?) It searches for the hard drive for about a minute and then gives the flashing folder with question mark / no hard drive found. Tried SMC and PRAM resets, reseating hard drive connector and still no go. I called and informed iFixIt who promptly sent a 2nd replacement. In the meantime, I put my logic board back in and confirmed that everything still booted up as normal. Received the replacement today, installed, and the same %#*@ thing! Am I missing something? Are the hard drive connectors a common point of failure and iFixIt just isn’t catching it in their testing before sending out refurbs? Is it just that I got 2 bad boards and I need to try a 3rd? Getting tired of pulling this thing apart so many times. Any help is appreciated. Thanks. Update (05/08/2018)
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Solved!! So I figured out what was wrong. My system was running High Sierra which means that the internal SSD drive had been converted to the newer APFS file system. Early OS versions are unable to read APFS drives! Part of the upgrade that enables APFS is a firmware/SMC update to the logic board. The replacement boards that I received had only ever been upgraded through OS-X Mountain Lion. So with the older logic boards there was no way for them to read the internal SSD drive, including the boot partition. Booting with a recovery disk I was able to go into Disk Utilities and determine that my disk was being seen just fine at the hardware level and in fact I could use the Verify function to actually see that all my files were there. So the solution was to: Attach an external USB drive (formatted to MacOS extended (journaled) with GUID partition scheme. I used a USB 3.0 drive which makes the process considerably faster.Hold Option, Command, R keys to enter Network RecoveryFollowed prompts to download OS-X Mountain Lion which I installed to the external drive USB driveOnce the install of OS-X was complete I checked for updates. It showed an SMC update and some other things so I went ahead and did those updates. Not sure if jumping right to the High Sierra update would have rolled up all of these into one… but didn’t want to find out. So I went ahead with them.Then when complete went back to App Store where it was prompting to install High Sierra 10.13.1. Went ahead and did that which includes a fairly long update period with multiple restarts as it upgrades the file system (on the USB drive) and performs the firmware updates to the logic board.Once update was complete it rebooted off the USB drive into High Sierra. Going to Finder it was obvious that everything had worked as I could see all of my internal SSD. So I shut down and disconnected the external USB drive.Powered up and it booted perfectly off my original, intact, internal SSD! Had to feed it a couple of passwords that must have failed some security check or what not… but other than that I was right back to where I was before. DONE! Thanks to iFixit for their patience while I worked through the troubleshooting to get this solved. So just realize that if you are upgrading the logic board on a computer that is running High Sierra on a SSD… that you need to be swapping in a logic board that has the appropriate SMC and firmware updates completed (i.e. harvested from a High Sierra running machine) or it will not be able to read any of your APFS formatted SSD drives (or if you’ve manually updated your HDD). You’ll have to either manually load the firmware updates (if they are even available stand alone?) or just do as I did, and labor through the OS upgrades to force the updates.
I’m suspecting you encrypted your drive so it will only work in your original logic board as its keyed to the S/N of your system. It won’t work with the replacement board. Review this: Use FileVault to encrypt the startup disk on your Mac You’ll need to create a bootable drive so you can enter the recovery key to unlock the drive. If you lost it heres a way to regain it: Obtain FileVault 2 recovery key with administrator account And if you can’t recover it - Ouch! Want to recover a FileVault-encrypted drive without a recovery key? You’re out of luck While you can undo file vault it will take some time! Your other option is to make a backup (un-encrypted) so you can wipe the drive down and re-install your OS and then recover your backup.
Hello guys! Good day…!! I am using MacBook early 2009 mb5.2 Max version supported by this Machin is Mac os X ek captain. I recently did a clean install of is High Sierra using patch tool. It’s working great, except for the hardware of camera and trackpad. And some times I feel very stuck on page. So I decided to downgrade OS. I had contacted Mac customer service, for any assistance. As per the instructions I went to OS recovery and tried reinstal. It always shows me High Sierra. To click to continue download and install. Where I wanted to roll back to the actual OS that came along with it at the time of purchase. In an another call with apple service care, I followed the instructions internet recovery. I went to boot menu DiskStation utility and selecting the Macintosh HD and erased all data, and then tried to recovery Mac os. But still the same high Sierra page to download and install. (Atleast it’s not download, gives me an error). And again later, when I restarted I see not HDD recognised or can’t get to recovery mode, or boot access, and none of these combination keys working, : Cmd+R; shift+ option+ command+ R; shift+ control+ command +P, press and hold D key while startup, or any are not working. Except the error of blinking question mark folder. I doubt my hdd dint fail or any hardware components issue. Like above it’s mentioned, I believe that after upgrading to High Sierra my Mac logic board had need updated it’s files to latest, and now won’t recognise hdd, or can’t take me to boot. Or recovery. Need help. Please somebody.
Funny…a SATA drive running 10.13.4 starts just fine but my SSD running 10.13.6 will not. Flashing ?
