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How do I fault-find a macbook pro that works fine in one OS but repeatedly shuts down soon after boot? (Every time the machine is booted into OSX environments, even the installer, the machine will shutdown soon after boot).

I have a MacBook Pro 5.5

It had a problem of randomly shutting down during boot. This corrupted (beyond easy recovery) the HD. I replaced that with an SSD. (I had backups of my data and the original MacBook Pro disc can probably be fixed).

I installed a Linux (Fedora 18, then Fedora 20). This was a 64 bit OS using all the HD. I had no problem with shutdowns. I could play full screen video, DVDs, play games, etc with no problems. There are frustrations using Fedora on this MBP, so I decide to wipe the drive and re-install Snow Leopard.

Installing OSX (Snow Leopard) from the grey discs that came with the machine is frustrating. The machine will reboot very soon (a few minutes) after I have booted from the grey Install disc. So far I have managed to boot and use disc utility to wipe the HD and reformat / partition to add a GUID HFS partition. But I am still getting shutdowns after a few minutes of use.

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  • Consider starting the Hardware test from one of the DVD's that came with the machine. You need to press a special key - this will ensure that your hardware is fine. I would suspect that your SSD disk is not OS X compatible.
    – Thorbjørn Ravn Andersen
    May 18, 2014 at 22:09

1 Answer 1

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Sounds like your hardware is fine and you have a brand new SSD.

Steps to heal it.

  • You can double check your hardware using the Apple Hardware check.

    Press D during startup (for Hardware test) you might no longer have it on your hard drive so do not worry for now)

  • Disconnect all external devices to make sure they do not do something stupid.

  • Start in Safe mode to eliminate other programs interfering.

    Press Shift during startup

If you mange to start open Console and look for logs before this start, and for reason why it shut down.

  • If the safe mode fails then try the Start up in Verbose mode.

    Press Command-V during startup

This is line by line mode showing you each step. Sometimes it will show your where it got hung up.

In any case your best source of information is the Console (but it requires a running computer)

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