Late-2011 R8911 value

[zgerbi]

Long time reader, first time poster. I've been diving down the rabbit hole of ways to make my old Late 2011 Macbook Pro useful. I had it running on Ubuntu 20.04 before the dGPU did what the dGPU's do on these machines, and I got something else. It went into storage for a while until I pulled it out a month or so ago to try to get something (anything) running on it. At first I tried the naive apple advice of using recovery mode to reinstall MacOS Lion, which worked! And then I tried upgrading to High Sierra because I got greedy, and it broke again, wouldn't even boot. Since then, I've tried internet recovery for Lion (certificates expired, changing date didn't fix anything), internet recovery for High Sierra (machine won't stay awake long enough to finish the download), Ubuntu 22.05 LTS and 20.04 LTS (could boot off USB, tried changing grub options before installing but would never boot from HDD once installed), and Arch Linux (never got far). I was left with a machine that had no operating system to speak of and wouldn't take to any of the solutions I could find, so I got desperate and removed (then promptly lost) R8911, as I read this could help. Unfortunately, I definitely missed some of the other steps required to make that mean anything, so the startup chime sounds but there's no picture or apparent functionality, even after resetting PRAM/NVRAM. I tried bridging the resistor pins to see if I could get anything out of it, which obviously didn't work. I know this was dumb, but I'm really not ready to give up on this beast of burden, nor really spend too much money.
I couldn't find it online, so I wanted to ask here: does anyone know/can check the value of that resistor so I could potentially replace it? Or is there another path forward with further hardware/software mods? I don't have much to lose at this point, so I'm really open to anything.

 

[MBAir2010]

if Lion worked, then go to el Capitan by using a USB bootable drive.
if that works, go to High Sierra onto El Capitan
I think the problem is Java script and security updates.
aslo
you need to set or update the FIRMWARE on the previous OS before upgrading to El Cap then high Sierra.

im here at home in a 86º sun porch watching football and
saving files while preparing my MacBook Pro for a fresh install of Mojave from Catalina now
so im free to help more.

 

[zgerbi]

if Lion worked, then go to el Capitan by using a USB bootable drive.
if that works, go to High Sierra onto El Capitan
I think the problem is Java script and security updates.
aslo
you need to set or update the FIRMWARE on the previous OS before upgrading to El Cap then high Sierra.

im here at home in a 86º sun porch watching football and
saving files while preparing my MacBook Pro for a fresh install of Mojave from Catalina now
so im free to help more.

I did try going to el Capitan via a boot drive made with TransMac; the USB would show up in Disk Utility, and would show as bootable, but couldn't be booted from for some reason; couldn't find any reason why and I don't have another mac, much less one that would have come with el Capitan or earlier. The Lion reinstall from internet recovery never worked again, unfortunately, and I think I borked everything by removing the R8911 resistor. Just trying to find a salvageable way forward from here, if there is one.

Guessing you're in Florida as well? Doesn't feel like swamp hell this time of year

 

[MBAir2010]

I love the cold weather, so i'm just trying to bear with life in sunny warmth all year long.

I would use apple boot process:

oxsdaily has a great how to guide and still likes apple products

I would also avoid anything non apple related for a source

this year I did so many reboots, reinstalls and the best advice I can give is "keep trying!'
I had red circles of death on 3 ssd drives, non readable WDssd dives and other helpless situations that all worked out with much persistence. I always stayed waiting the apple way and source of rebooting Macs.

I did have to replace my hard drive ribbon connection strip
on my MacBook Pro 2012 last month after getting horrible codes after starting up.
hopefully that is not your problem

 

[zgerbi]

I love the cold weather, so i'm just trying to bear with life in sunny warmth all year long.

I would use apple boot process:

oxsdaily has a great how to guide and still likes apple products

I would also avoid anything non apple related for a source

this year I did so many reboots, reinstalls and the best advice I can give is "keep trying!'
I had red circles of death on 3 ssd drives, non readable WDssd dives and other helpless situations that all worked out with much persistence. I always stayed waiting the apple way and source of rebooting Macs.

I did have to replace my hard drive ribbon connection strip
on my MacBook Pro 2012 last month after getting horrible codes after starting up.
hopefully that is not your problem

Unfortunately the problem is definitely the faulty dGPU's on these. I was doing nothing but booting and rebooting with different OS's and options for over a month, but now I can't do any of that without either replacing the R8911 resistor I removed and/or diving further into hardware modifications.

I'll say, I did switch to Ubuntu before anything broke because any Apple ecosystem advantage I would get from using MacOS was kinda negated by how old the OS and hardware were. Couldn't really use any apps or modern features like AirDrop, so if I am able to get it working I'd probably still rather have another OS on it.

 

[MBAir2010]

ahhh I guess that explains why no one else here interfered

I hope you get that MacBook Pro to work soon.

 

[zgerbi]

ahhh I guess that explains why no one else here interfered

I hope you get that MacBook Pro to work soon.

Me too lol. Thanks for your help though!

 

[zgerbi]

Alright, for anyone else who's as dumb as me: according to this diagram I found, on the top left of the "GPU VCore Regulator" page (page 81) it seems to be a 1 ohm resistor, +/- 5%. I don't know if I have the soldering skill, if I've butchered it beyond repair, or if this diagram is accurate, but I've got nothing to lose so I'll give it a shot. As soon as I do, I'll update here if it works or not.

 

[anyany]

If R8911 is responsible for powering the AMD GPU circuit, I also associate some low value (1R or 0R). I soldered it out a few years ago (during this operation it flew away from me and I couldn't find it anymore). However, this is a VERY small resistor, normally I mount SMD resistors of size 0603 (0402 rarely), but this resistor was REALLY small. At the time I even had a layout of this part of the PCB with the mounting location of this resistor shown, unfortunately these details were lost when I changed to a younger computer.