MacBook Pro GPU AMD failure
Status: Resolved
Publication date: 2018-05-20
Last edited by: Garyf
Last updated: 2023 - 09 - 8
The problem
A friend has an issue with an issue where his MacBook Pro late 2011 was not booting. Looking at the issue and finding information online, it turns out the AMD card seems to fail on MacBook Pros.
The resolution
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Device: MacBook Pro
Operating system: MacOS
Software: Single user mode
Guidance for MacBook Pro, MacOS, Single user mode
Boot up in single user mode by holding down Cmd S when you turn on your Mac, enter the following:
nvram fa4ce28d-b62f-4c99-9cc3-6815686e30f9:gpu-power-prefs=%01%00%00%00
Turn on Verbose mode as default:
nvram boot-args=”-v”
and type in:
reboot
The machine should now boot normally.
Device: MacBook Pro
Operating system: MacOS
Software: ArchLinux
Guidance for MacBook Pro, MacOS, ArchLinux
Well first of all I had a USB stick with a non-GUI version of Linux, I used ArchLinux. I won’t go into the details here, but I did have issues copying the ISO of ArchLinux onto a USB stick using my own Mac. You can see how I did this here.
Stick the USB disk in with ArchLinux on into the MacBook pro.
Power on the machine, ideally it needs to have the power cable attached to the machine. As soon as you hit power, press down the alt key at the same time.
You will get an option to either boot from the Macs hard drive, or UEFI. Select UEFI, you will see something like this:
Ensure you have the top item selected for ArchLinux and press e. As you can see at the bottom of this image you will see a line, at the end of that line add nomodeset and hit enter.
You will be booted into ArchLinux:
Change the directory by running the command:
cd /sys/firmware/efi/efivars
You will see something like this:
Run the command
ls
That is an L not an I. Hit enter and you will something like:
