On last Saturday I left my MacBook Pro (15-inches display, mid-2012 release) on during the night in order to finish some backup tasks and I scheduled its shutdown for a certain time using shutdown -h.
On the next morning, I turned the machine back on but, unfortunately, the display seemed to not work. First of all, supposing the issue was due to some software level failures during shutdown, I have made the following operations:
- NVRAM/PRAM reset.
- SMC reset.
- File system analysis.
I was using two APFS containers - one for a data-only partition, the other for different OS partitions with shared memory - and Disk Utility printed some warnings related to the main OS partition. - Considering what has been just said, main OS partition initialization and clean macOS High Sierra reinstalling.
Despite all these operations, the issue still persists: the main display does not turn on but everything else works properly (for instance, using an external display through Thunderbolt connection, all seems fine).
That said, are there some other operations that you suggest to do in order to isolate and find the cause of this issue? Since it seems, taking into account what I listed above, that it is not related to software layer, are there some simple checks that can be made on machine hardware without particular risk to generate further issues?
Optket while booting, does the boot manger interface appear?diskutilto “it’s the software layer.” I wrote an answer on resetting NVRAM/SMC and reinstalling the OS. (Second part of answer) as part of the repair procedure. Its worth a read.