MacBook Pro shutting down while booting

[cs.oyen]

Hi everyone,

I'm facing an issue with a 2011 MacBook Pro (i5).

This is something persistent, I can't define a exact time to happens but is a "normal" behavior.

The problem I'm facing is basically this:

Without any previous identified error or problem this Mac in one random occasion after shut down while power on (booting screen) shuts down and can't get any way to make it booting properly again.

First time this happened to me I formatted the internal drive, installed the High Sierra (happens as well on Sierra) and install all my software from the very first beginning (didn't recover from Time Machine to avoid any possible software problem).

After one or two days later after doing a normal shut down try to power on and stuck with this problem.

It's the third time I reformat the computer and always with any specific action from my part this happens and I can't understand the problem.

I run a Diagnostics test from USB and no error found. If I want to boot from any OS X USB installer Mac works fine. Track pad, keyboard everything working fine.

I also try to check my boot drive (have two ssd's installed) and when run first aid process it can't go thought and give me this error message:

"First Aid process has failed. If possible back up the data on this volume" (error -8).

Reading this error message I assume that maybe have a problem with the boot SSD but it's a bit weird because both SSD's are completely brand new.

I will try to install OS X on the other SSD and check if have this issue too.

If someone already have this issue or know something about it can please give me a little help, to make sure I', doing this properly?

Sorry for my English.

Thank you!

EDIT: also try to do SMC and PRAM reset and didn't help.

 

[DeltaMac]

Power off during boot is often a bad boot drive.
You have two possibilities, I think.
1. Failing boot drive.
2. Failing SATA cable (that connects your boot drive to the logic board.)

If you test by installing macOS on the OTHER drive (also an SSD (?)), then if you want a good test, disconnect the drive that you are not booting from. That should rule out the other (non-booting) drive. Both drives get powered up during boot, so it's still possible that an issue on the non-booting drive might affect the boot from the other drive. Disconnect that non-boot drive just for troubleshooting.

If you have an SSD (and not a spinning hard drive), that does not mean that you don't have a bad drive. New parts fail, too. If this is a recent purchase, then your failed drive should have a warranty from the manufacturer.

 

[cs.oyen]

Power off during boot is often a bad boot drive.
You have two possibilities, I think.
1. Failing boot drive.
2. Failing SATA cable (that connects your boot drive to the logic board.)

If you test by installing macOS on the OTHER drive (also an SSD (?)), then if you want a good test, disconnect the drive that you are not booting from. That should rule out the other (non-booting) drive. Both drives get powered up during boot, so it's still possible that an issue on the non-booting drive might affect the boot from the other drive. Disconnect that non-boot drive just for troubleshooting.

If you have an SSD (and not a spinning hard drive), that does not mean that you don't have a bad drive. New parts fail, too. If this is a recent purchase, then your failed drive should have a warranty from the manufacturer.

Hi!

First of all thank you very much for your time!

Yes both hard drives are SSD (same brand model and capacity).

I tried to disconnect the sata cable from the second hard drive but still shutting down.

At this moment I'm doing a fresh install of mac os into the second drive with the first one disconnected. Let's see if can go through or have the same problem.

Anyway I check something I didn't realize before.
All time I have the operating system installed into the hard drive located on the old dvd drive and not into the standard place.

Maybe that can cause this problem?

Sure I know that something new is not 100% reliable and can have a problem like a used stuff.

Thanks!

 

[DeltaMac]

Which MBPro do you have?
There are 6 different MBPros that are 2011.
Early 2011 MBPros could have either 3.0 or 6.0 SATA connection in the optical bay
Late 2011 are all 6.0 Gbps speed.
That would not really give you any problems, just that the drive in the optical slot might not get best speed possible.

 

[cs.oyen]

Which MBPro do you have?
There are 6 different MBPros that are 2011.
Early 2011 MBPros could have either 3.0 or 6.0 SATA connection in the optical bay
Late 2011 are all 6.0 Gbps speed.
That would not really give you any problems, just that the drive in the optical slot might not get best speed possible.

Sorry I forget to mention the model.

It's an early 2011 MacBook Pro, 13'', i5, with both SATA connections running at 6.0 Gbps.

Already done all the OS installation, configuration and installed all my software. For now is running okay.

I want to do some tests to try to identify if the problem is and faulty SSD. You konw some Mac OS software to stress and test disk health?

Thank you!

 

[DeltaMac]

Best "stress test", in my experience, is Erase (format), and Install macOS. When the install and setup is complete, shut down. Some boot drive will show problems when attempting to boot from power off.

Have you checked that your SSDs have current firmware? (some manufacturers supply firmware updates only for Windows, which can be a problem if you don't do Windows )

 

[cs.oyen]

Best "stress test", in my experience, is Erase (format), and Install macOS. When the install and setup is complete, shut down. Some boot drive will show problems when attempting to boot from power off.

Have you checked that your SSDs have current firmware? (some manufacturers supply firmware updates only for Windows, which can be a problem if you don't do Windows )

Thank you.

Really if I try to push my memory I remember that many times I try to format (from usb) at the end OS X installer give me some times a message about any problem "expanding" or "giving permissions" during the installation but if I reboot after that can go to normal setup so I ignore that because think that's some "bug" from the OS X installer.

About the firmware I need to find my SSD's model to check but for now I got some information about firmware updates just to Mac/OS X (maybe there are some errors when installed into Mac computers).

One thing I noticed with this new installation is the CPU temperatures. For now is working temperature is something less 10 degrees comparative with the other disk (before the average idle CPU temperature was ~60 degrees now around 45-55 degrees). Even in full load can get a difference around 10 degrees as well.

I will check the firmware question and if find something will post here maybe can help other users too.

 

[cs.oyen]

@DeltaMac

After a few days testing at this point no signal of any problem I assume the problem was a hard drive.

Will send the faulty SSD to RMA.

Unfortunately my SSD's don't have any firmware upgrade available, I was looking for other ssd model when I speak about the firmware tool upgrade for Mac.

I have two other questions about this, If you can give me some help I appreciate.

- For this model (early 2011 i5 13') what can I assume as the "normal" working temperatures? After changing the faulty ssd the overall temperatures changed to better values but I think (maybe wrong) that still a but high.

- One reason to have the 2 sdd's was the "physical" possibility to have a software Raid 0 install of OS X (to increase the read/write speeds). I noticed the last releases of Mac OS don't offer support for Raid booting volumes. That can be bypassed but what you think, really worth having a Raid 0?

Thank you!

 

[DeltaMac]

As the hardware gets older, the "normal" working temp would tend to go higher.
The temp would also be different, depending on how you use your Mac, so "normal" temps are not just simple numbers.
You could do some maintenance, such as making sure the cooling air path is clean inside your Macbook Pro.
And, you could use one of the utilities that control fan speed. Manually increase the speed, if you really want to keep your MBPro cooler. Higher fan speed will use more battery, so you would want to adjust the fan speed down if you need to be portable (and use the battery more)
I doubt that a RAID boot setup will result in much difference that you would notice beyond the speed increase that you already have by changing from a spinning hard drive to an SSD.
But, if you want to experiment with a RAID system, just for fun, then there's nothing wrong with that.
Note that a RAID 0 boot setup is not a safe way to keep your files. It's more important to keep a good backup. If one part of the RAID fails (and you just replaced an SSD that failed), then you lose the RAID completely.

 

[cs.oyen]

As the hardware gets older, the "normal" working temp would tend to go higher.
The temp would also be different, depending on how you use your Mac, so "normal" temps are not just simple numbers.
You could do some maintenance, such as making sure the cooling air path is clean inside your Macbook Pro.
And, you could use one of the utilities that control fan speed. Manually increase the speed, if you really want to keep your MBPro cooler. Higher fan speed will use more battery, so you would want to adjust the fan speed down if you need to be portable (and use the battery more)
I doubt that a RAID boot setup will result in much difference that you would notice beyond the speed increase that you already have by changing from a spinning hard drive to an SSD.
But, if you want to experiment with a RAID system, just for fun, then there's nothing wrong with that.
Note that a RAID 0 boot setup is not a safe way to keep your files. It's more important to keep a good backup. If one part of the RAID fails (and you just replaced an SSD that failed), then you lose the RAID completely.

Oh sure you are right I forget to explain what I do about the temperatures. Recently I have cleaned all the inside, replaced the cpu thermal paste and cleaned the heat sink. After that temperatures are much the same.

After installed Mac OS into the healthy hdd they look a bit better but in full load can go up to 93 degrees what I think is a little higher but the cpu into this machine is not new and I am not very familiar with this because the main Mac I use it's an MacBook Air (2013).

Do you think in full load up to 93 degrees is an acceptable temperate (fan runs at maximum speed)?

Raid for this specific case is just to get better write and read speeds but to be honest the performance is the same without a Raid setup (0) into a single disk I got write/read around 380/450 MB/s into a Raid 0 got around the double but in real workflow can't notice notable differences, will keep as it is, 2 disks. One for the OS X and apps other to large files (like VMs etc).

 

[DeltaMac]

OK!
If you have done all that, then your temps would depend on the load. Meaning that the fans are simply responding to try to cool your system down.
So, high temps, and the fans (doing their job), are mostly because of your workload.
Again, you will likely see the culprit(s) in your Activity Monitor/CPU tab.