I had quite the freak out moment this morning regarding my 17″ MacBook Pro (Duo 2.16GHz model). During the course of the morning I had to reboot the darn thing, but after the restart, it never came back up. Just a black screen. Then I noticed that the white status light on the lid clasp was blinking rather quickly. I’ve never seen that before so I started to panic. Especially when I couldn’t get it to boot even when plugged into the charger.
A quick search of Google made me really freak out. Most people seem to suggest that the quick blinking light means that the logic board (motherboard for those PC users out there) has an issue. Ugh, not the logic board. That’s an expensive repair typically and sometimes just worth it to buy a new system. So, I made sure the laptop was unplugged and dropped the battery out of the MacBook and let it sit a couple minutes. Then I put the battery back in and plugged it in and it turned back on. Phew. Good news is I just did a reinstall recently and had backed up ALL of my data. Bad news is that my MacBook is probably on its last legs. Hopefully it lasts through 2011 as I haven’t planned on purchasing a new one.
I have the same problem with my Macbook Pro 15” 2.2 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo – it just went trough repair. I had the logic board replaced because it went bad. It started booting to black screen and fast-blinking status light immediately after I took it back from repair. I went back, they fixed it, but it happened again two days later.
Your solution to the problem worked for me. I just tried it! Thanks!
Since it already has a new logic board, there must be something else causing the black screen/quick blinking. Do you know what could be the problem then?
Yeah, it could be some sort of wacky power issue and letting the computer rest unplugged and dropping the battery out makes it sort of reset itself. Not really sure. If they replaced the logic board and its still happening, it could be the power module that’s bad. When I first got mine, I had all sorts of power issues and they had to replace that as well as the battery.