Hello,
Please help me bring this old laptop back to life. I've spent over a year trying different dumps and still flashing EFI with no success. I'm very glad i've found this forum and such a creative community - you are my last chance and only hope. I don't want to dump this laptop, since i'm computer enthusiast - i will still find it useful.
The hardware is MacBook Pro 3,1 A1226 - "Core 2 Duo" 2.2 15" (SR) T7500, EMC 2136
I've attached current - corrupted EFI dump, and "empty" (no serial and CPU info etc.) dump from Apple EFI restoration CD. Maybe it would be possible to "combine" them?
Thanks!
What makes you sure the BIOS is bad? Its more likely you have a dead Nvidia card. A sign of this is the light on the front coming on and the fans spinning (and nothing else)
Thanks for your reply.
After a disk encryption went wrong due to power outage (no battery) - i was able to run MacOs X installer from CD, but it crashed after some progress. Next, i wasn't able to boot anything because all i got was black screen and chime loop 3 times, then restart. Occasionally after powering on the machine, the screen turns on and I'm able to select boot devices again and run installer, which crashes again.
To sum it all, no screen artifacts occured - so i guess it's not BGA failure.
The Mac is not able to boot properly i guess.
EDIT: all i get is black screen with four Apple chimes, then restart.
RAM slots cleared and checked with different bones. Also, without any RAM - there is only black screen and front led blink 2 times continuously, no beep or chime.
As i mentioned before, i tried different bones so i guess it's not RAM fault. No LED blinking at startup with RAM installed.
According to Apple - "If your Mac detects no Random Access Memory (RAM)—or if the RAM installed doesn't meet specifications—the display remains black but the power LED on the front of the computer (if present) blinks once per second to signal the error."
The reasons I suspect the EFI ROM corruption are:
- everything worked normally until disk encryption went wrong
- Mac could run Mac OS X installer from CD and crashed after some progress
- I have seen other MBP A1226 with BGA failure - there are artifacts on the screen and then panic
Thank you Vinnie! I've wrote this EFI file onto the chip and verified it by reading down again from chip and compare. The Mac is still not booting, the screen is not turning on. The difference now is that, it makes no chime or beep and is not restarting all over again. Would you be so kind and verify the file again?
Forgive me, I might be wrong. I haven't tried any operations like this before... I've noticed the differences in old and new binary - new one looks great, but doesn't it lacks the "Override Version" section with serial number of Mac?
Vinnie, thanks a lot again for your effort!
My apologies for that, i worked with several versions of the file.
I tested each file on my own A1226, all worked well. I had a edited version for your machine, and deleted the other versions.
Time for a redo, probably deleted the working file and posted the wrong file.
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