CURSED DAUGHTER OF UPDATE, on the cheap, early 2011 i7 2.0 anti-glare A1286!
(an update in six parts)
Well… things kind of escalated quickly.
FIRST, an unexpected thing happened.
Last weekend,
another local seller who hadn’t replied to my inquiry a fortnight ago about the posting for of their dead, anti-glare, early 2011 2.0 i7 A1286 — priced even lower than the one I
did buy a fortnight ago — suddenly pinged back a week later and was all, “Sure, it’s yours if you want it.” So, well, at the equivalent of $15 in freedom dollars ($20 in maple money), I picked up a second, identical-spec laptop built two months earlier. (No hard drive or MagSafe adapter, but try buying any single working component inside for less than that, with shipping; at the very least, having this as a parts donor will be good.)
Unlike the first, which I
have gotten up and running, this second one faces deeper issues.
Namely, when it POSTs (if it posts… chiming
very quietly), it either reaches a dark screen, a off-white screen, or an off-white screen with vertical line distortion from the all-but dead Radeon GPU.
As with the first A1286, the OEM battery in there is dead dead dead.
Unlike the first A1286, I cannot boot into a live USB of Arch Linux, because the EFI boot options screen won’t appear. (Yes, I even disconnected the HDD cable at the board, as this is known to sometimes present an all-white screen problem
beyond anything relating to a model’s dying/dead GPU.)
So for now, that’s a deeper project I’ll keep around for later, but I’m in no rush to futz with it.
Cosmetically, it has one, blunt-force dent on the front, toward the right (in front of the HDD bay), which I may be able to finesse back out eventually. It was also a
lot more dusty inside than the other A1286, suggesting the combination of Apple’s poor thermal management design, accelerated by someone who didn’t take care of their stuff (clogged fin stacks, caked fans, and a sheen of fine dust all over the board) is what hastened the complete failure of the dGPU, preventing other workarounds without, probably, a complete replacement of the Radeon to get it to POST and boot (which would, at least, let it plod along in that slow-death way).
SECOND, the working, used OEM battery arrived.
The A-grade OEM battery from the aforementioned, reputable seller (’sup, Beetstech) arrived late last week.
I put it in last night, but it wasn’t until this evening before I could have a better look at its age and health, given what I paid for (i.e., more than what I paid for the entire MBP, but maybe a difference of about $20 — well less of what Apple once charged when they still stocked them at the Apple Store).
View attachment 2411774
Given the date of manufacture, my guess is the battery came from a mid-2012 donor. Between the cycle count, the hardware mod I completed successfully, and setting Charge Limiter to 80 per cent (same as my late 2011 A1278), this battery ought to, hopefully, last for the remainder of my ever using this laptop. I now know an OEM battery
serial beginning with D8 is from
Simplo.
THIRD, I’m
still having trouble with the dosdude1-patched Mojave on this system and the iSight camera not working. Help with troubleshooting is welcomed.
The green iSight light comes on, but camera preview window remains blank/black. On the testing HDD this laptop is using, there is also an install of Lion; I confirmed the camera works fine on 10.7.5, so this is a specific software thing related to this MacBookPro8,2’s patching. I’m at a loss, and feedback or pointers to other solutions on the forums or elsewhere is definitely welcomed here.
I don’t think it’s security denying access, given this message on Console upon launch of Photo Booth (which, by default, has audio-video access, out-of-box on a fresh install):
View attachment 2411777
iSight camera also doesn’t work in QuickTime, FaceTime, or custom avatar setup for Users & Groups. When starting a video record in QuickTime, a series of the same error repeats about 20 times (probably hardware/system re-attempts before giving up):
View attachment 2411782
[My understanding is the iSight Patch relates to fixes for the MBP5,2 only and wouldn’t address the issue here on the MBP8,2.]
I may try pulling out my iSight FireWire camera this week (it’s buried in a box) to verify whether this issue carries over to other camera devices outside the internal bus.
As it is, my patches include:
View attachment 2411813
(I parse “version 0” as a patch which is not currently being used, but someone please correct me if that’s wrong.)
FOURTH, I think I figured out why the 8GB Corsair stick keeps showing up as 4GB.
Of all the sticks I’ve tested in the A1286, it’s the only DDR3 module I have which is 1066MHz; the rest have all been 1333MHz. Even when it’s the only stick, either bay, it still shows as 4GB in the A1286 (but 8GB in my late 2011 A1278); even the Corsair model number displayed by Memtest86 shows one change of digit (an 8, denoting 8GB, turns into a 4 mysteriously). What this tells me is a 16GB setup will require two, 1333MHz or greater DDR3 sticks.
FIFTH, there are multiple workarounds posted working around the Radeon dGPU issue. All but one involve bodge wires and/or highly skilled, delicate soldering; the other is understood as a stop-gap.
For now, I took the risk of the method presented by RealMacMods,
from the 2018 Wayback Machine capture, on their steps for disabling power and logic to the dGPU. Yes, it has problems (like the imperative to never zap NVRAM/PRAM, something I never really do anyway on Intel Macs).
[Also, it calls for downloading Arch Linux, but sometime after 2021, Arch’s boot procedure changed, making it impossible for the live system to boot with the current trio of monthly updates (whether with or without the
nomodeset flag appended in GRUB). Once I could find
an older, 2021 build, the RealMacMods steps proceeded without hassle.]
Of the three known, somewhat invasive workarounds — the
SPI-ROM flashing; the
gMux IC wire re-routing; and the RealMacMods removal of one resistor, R8911, whose removal cuts power to the dGPU (following the setting and locking of the same basic EFI variables in
the firmware workaround, but modifying the EFI file system commands via the Arch Linux live boot), I chose the latter because I’m terrible.
View attachment 2411825
My soldering skills, on a 1 to 10 — dosdude1 being an 11, if we’re being 💯 — are maybe a 3.5
when I’m in practice (which I am decidedly not). Removing a resistor this small is at the upper reach of my solder skills (the R8911 resistor is maybe one-fourth the size of a just-hatched monarch caterpillar (a monarch caterpillar egg, at about 1mm wide, can rest on the head of a sewing pin, so the R8911 resistor would have no trouble falling
through the head).
I almost made a mistake (when a blob of solder fell and melted across several, adjacent SMD pieces), but I’d prepared for that possibility with flux, solder, and copper wick (all invaluable).
Knowing it would either work or fail catastrophically, I put the removed, minuscule, but probably now-damaged resistor into a tiny zip-shut baggie, taping that to the laptop battery as a reminder for later, then powered it on.
And well, this is what I’m now seeing:
View attachment 2411776
I think I’ll be good with this.
SIXTH and last, once I’m able to solve the iSight camera issue (I’d like to solve this within the week, since I’ve video meetings coming up soon after), I may try out the viability of migrating both SSDs from my late 2011 13-inch A1278 MBP to the A1286, to determine whether both my 10.6.8 build with roots dating back to 5 September
2009 (on one SSD), and the dosdude1-patched 10.14.6 for the MBP8,1 A1278 (on the other SSD) can both boot properly in a mildly different hardware setting from the same generation.
Seriously, though:
if anyone might have a clear grasp why iSight is not working, I’m all ears.
Pics of the final laptop doing ordinary laptop things, with the replaced clutch cover and capacities within upgraded, are still to come.
iSight notwithstanding, I think I’m beginning to like this infernal thing.
EDIT to add: It’s a long weekend and I’m quite awake, so heck it. I pulled the parts box from the basement to find and connect both the iSight FireWire camera and a basic, borescope-style USB camera (which I use for things like board close-ups).
The system did recognize the iSight FW camera and the live image appeared in both QuickTime and PhotoBooth. The USB borescope camera was not recognized (though its bus-powered LED ring lighting worked fine). (That camera works on the A1278.) Even with iSight FW working, I could not get the system to, say, use the iSight FW on Photo Booth whilst trying to use the built-in iSight in QuickTime.
So I’m stumped: cameras on USB aren’t happy, nor are they happening.
