As the title says, I have a mid-2009 17" MBP which has developed a strange problem with booting and (sometimes) waking from sleep.
In a nutshell... When I press the power button, I can hear the bong and the initial seek of the DVD drive. Most of the time, the system drops into what appears to be a sleep mode from which it can't be awakened and I can only hard power off the system by holding down the power button. This apparent sleep usually occurs immediately, but may not occur until after the Apple logo and progress bar appear. If I retry enough times, particularly with a long enough wait between attempts, it will boot to the login screen. If I make it to the login screen, everything is fine until I let it go to sleep or reboot.
I've tried numerous SMC and PRAM resets and neither has had any effect on the problem.
I've also tried different chargers, but that has not changed anything.
Possibly related is the fact that I also can no longer run Virtual Machines under Fusion as the system will do the same hard sleep as soon as the VM tries to boot.
I've also tried booting from a USB stick with the same result, so I don't think the problem is the OS installation on the disk.
I suspect I'm looking at a hardware issue, though I don't know what piece and whether it is replaceable.
Any information/advice would be helpful. Thanks...
In a nutshell... When I press the power button, I can hear the bong and the initial seek of the DVD drive. Most of the time, the system drops into what appears to be a sleep mode from which it can't be awakened and I can only hard power off the system by holding down the power button. This apparent sleep usually occurs immediately, but may not occur until after the Apple logo and progress bar appear. If I retry enough times, particularly with a long enough wait between attempts, it will boot to the login screen. If I make it to the login screen, everything is fine until I let it go to sleep or reboot.
I've tried numerous SMC and PRAM resets and neither has had any effect on the problem.
I've also tried different chargers, but that has not changed anything.
Possibly related is the fact that I also can no longer run Virtual Machines under Fusion as the system will do the same hard sleep as soon as the VM tries to boot.
I've also tried booting from a USB stick with the same result, so I don't think the problem is the OS installation on the disk.
I suspect I'm looking at a hardware issue, though I don't know what piece and whether it is replaceable.
Any information/advice would be helpful. Thanks...