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Mediados de 2006 / número de modelo A1181 / carcasa negra o blanca / procesador Intel Core Duo de 1,83 o 2,0 GHz.

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Wont boot past grey screen with no logo, chimes over and over

My customers 13" MacBook White will not boot up at all. Only a Grey screen, you get the first chime then it just keeps chiming over and over again but the rest are not as loud. I have removed the hard drive no difference. I have removed the memory and that's the only time it wont boot to a screen like expected. I have also tried one memory stick. The only key stroke that works is apple,option ,p,r but after it reboots it still the same thing.

So I have a Chime, Grey screen with NO LOGO, or POINTER btw. And constant chime at lower level after. I think its the board please tell me whats going on.

Owner states he thinks he got a virus on it, then the baby started hitting buttons. After a reboot machine never came back up. But i think I ruled that out by getting the same effect by removing the hard drive.

BIOS / Firmware problems? I have 18 years pc repair my first attempt at mac.

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Is there a disk stuck in the optical drive?

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Since you're a PC person, do you know the difference between the startup chime and the bad RAM beep? No disrespect intended.

The thread on this problem may be helpful: http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa...

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There is no disk in the drive, I had the os disk in but it would just keep spinning could not get it out. I removed dvd drive to get out. Yes I'm familiar with a pcs memory beep.

This mac with no memory will just give me a back screen. and the white light just blinks.

With memory in I get what i believe is the start up sound "chime". Then it never stops doing that.

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Adding a You Tube video soon.

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Solución Elegida

Could be a bad top case. I would remove the battery, remove the top case, use known working ram, disconnect the optical drive, remove airport card, connect the ac adapter and try to power the macbook directly from the logic board by tripping the two power contact points located at the bottom of the fan. To find the contact points check for PWR white letters or the power switch icon. If the macbook boots normally this way then reconnect components but restart after each connection until you find the culprit. If nothing works then the problem is probably related to the logic board. Any liquid spilled on this macbook ?

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Thanks that is some good info about top case pwr switch to go on. Im still new to all the mac tricks.

Oh yeah and about the ram I guess that wasn't corrosion, like mention above. Will update soon.

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Just like a white cream on the ram stick gold contacts is normal. Probably helps the ram stick connectivity.

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The no bad RAM tone has me baffled. Here's what it should do:

RAM–related boot errors (sounds):

Apple: 1–5 tones or breaking glass sounds on boot.

  • 1 beep = No RAM installed/detected
  • 2 beeps = Incompatible RAM type installed (for example, EDO)
  • 3 beeps = No RAM banks passed memory testing
  • 4 beeps = Bad checksum for the remainder of the boot ROM
  • 5 beeps = Bad checksum for the ROM boot block

Try a known good stick and try it one at a time in each of the slots, I've seen these machines drop a slot.

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lemerise thank you. I have solved the problem the mac would do all that due to a bad DVD drive. After disconnecting and process of elimination ended with dvd. Now its boots up fast and works great. Thank you all, for my first mac experience was not to bad.

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+ congratulations

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Before buying a DVD drive try another optical drive cable. It could be the problem. Glad you succeed...Did you boot up the machine via contact points ?

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You should accept Lemerise's answer instead being that it led to a resolution.

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Yes I did boot off of the contact pins after I finally found them. Didn't think to remove the dvd drive when I had the top on. I tried it with just the optical drive cable alone and it boots that way.

Oh yeah the machine still does not beep with no RAM, just the white light blinks. So I dont know if that is a defect or not. But it works great now. I reinstalled the DVD drive but did not connect it. The owner was so happy its working he does not care. Will spend the 65 bucks later if he needs to.

Thanks again.

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I know my response is a few years late but I had the same thing happen to me and my computer is working now. My story might not help since I never found the problem but here is what happened to me...

I had just finished a long editing session on my Mac Pro workstation and shut the computer down for the night. In the morning I turned it back on and and was sitting at the white screen of death, never making it to the apple logo. It's rare but it happens sometimes so I manually powered down.

  • First I tried resetting the PRAM with Option-Command-P-R on startup. The first chime happened and then the second chime only partially happened and then kept chirping over and over like in this video posted about.... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tQuo-67iC... The only difference with my situation was the chirping chimes were about half of the duration. Probably about 100ms long chimes. I tried restarting after without the PRAM reset command and the same thing happened with the short chimes repeating.
  • I tried SHIFT on startup but Safe Boot mode didn't work.
  • I decided to try booting from the Restore DVD. The optical drive tray wouldn't open with Eject, F12, or holding the mouse button down so I had to pull it out of the bay and manually press the button to eject the tray which worked fine. I held C on startup but just ended up at the white screen again with the same repeating chime. Then I tried starting while holding option to see if I could boot from the Restore DVD volume via Startup Manager. That didn't work either. Same result.
  • I removed the 32GB of ram I'd upgraded to and replaced it with the measly 2GB of stock Apple ram that it came with. Same results.
  • I removed my upgraded 2GB GTX 680 graphics card and replaced it with the stock 512MB ATI 2600 XT card and that did nothing.
  • I tried removing all hard drives except the boot drive. Tried removing all hard drives including the boot drive. Tried removing the optical drive in combination with only the boot drive in and with no drives or optical drive. Lastly I tried booting off the Restore DVD with only the optical drive plugged in. Nothing worked.
  • The whole time I only had one Apple Cinema Display plugged in and only the Apple keyboard and mouse that came with the computer. I kept the devices connected to the computer to the bare minimum the whole time while troubleshooting to make sure there was nothing plugged into any ports that could be causing conflict. I also blasted what dust I could see with canned air when I started just in case.
  • The very last thing I did was try unplugging the keyboard and mouse and starting the computer and that didn't work.

That's when I gave up, figured it was a logic board issue, and started scraping up funds to get a replacement workstation asap.

PROBLEM SOLVED >>> I spent the next two days of my life hating life because I had gone from working on my super fast 8-Core Mac Pro to working on my 1.3GHz MacBook Air. My work is pretty demanding of the CPU and GPU and operations on the laptop were taking between 4-10x as long depending on what software I was in. I literally said to my computer "Why can't you just turn on?" and in a moment of desperation I decided to press the power button one last time. My computer started up completely normal and was booted into OS X in a matter of seconds.

So it fixed itself somehow. It sat idle for 2 days and whatever happened in that time worked itself out and it magically turned on. I know this write up probably can't help anybody in the same situation get back up and running since I don't actually know what the solution was. It does drive home the fact that that this is indeed a mysterious problem.

POST FIX - After it turned back on I shut down and booted up a half dozen times with my fingers crossed and everything booted like normal. Then I started putting the pieces back together one component at a time and rebooting each time to see if one of the components caused problem to return.

I added the the 32GB of ram back and rebooted and everything was fine. Then I added my internal hard drives back one by one rebooting each time. Then the optical drive got plugged in with a normal reboot. Last came swapping out the stock graphics card with my upgraded GPU. And there it is. My computer was back to it's fully upgraded self and running like a champ.

The problem and the fact that it fixed itself after just sitting there for a couple days is beyond me. It's not heat related because the problem started after it was off overnight so it started cool. I can't wrap my head around it.

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This is driving me crazy!!!! I have the exact same sound on my MacBook Pro Retina display. I bought it exactly 367 days ago. Really??? My daughter was playing minecraft and closed the cover. We did just upgrade to the latest operating system.. I can get nothing on my computer!!! I don't have a DVD drive. It is bare bones. Any advice at all would be great. A trip to the apple bar can't happen. I seriously can't afford them.

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