Macbook pro (early 2011) won't boot after sleep. Black screen with chime

I put my macbook pro early 2011 (Quad, 8 Gb RAM, 2 x SSD-disks, external 27" LED-screen) into sleep mode a couple of days ago. Everything was fine then.
However, the morning after it wouldn't wake up - this is the bootup process:
- Black screen
- Chime
- Still black screen, nothing happens.
So I've tried resetting NVRAM, SMC etc - no luck. Even tried the "Powerbutton" + "S" + Enter but to no avail.So I immediately began dd:ing my SSD-disk before trying anything else, figured it might be some preboot-corruption of some sort since I'm running FileVault2 with full AES-encryption.
Now, the problem (after some troubleshooting) doesn't seem to be disk-oriented. Remember the black screen? I've tried pulling the SATA-cables one by one on the motherboard of the Macbook pro and discovered that when I pulled the cable which reaches over the optical device (just above the SATA-cable for the optical device) then I get a white screen and I'm able to get as far as boot-option, or even disk repair (if I run my SSD-disk over USB and without any cables (three of them) attacked to the motherboard).
So since nothing works when I have disks connected or that third cable (some kind of logic board bridge? Reaches through the screen over to the other side of the mother board).
Also worth noting is that I was running out of free disk-space on my system disk. The disk is 250 Gb and free space was about 5-10 Gb (less than 5%). I also make the macbook pro dump contents of memory to disk (since my disk is encrypted it resides safely there).
So, my fear is that Apple hasn't used A-grade controllers for the disk drives (I've had drive corruption before, a Crucial 6 GB/s drive trashed less than a week before a presentation) and doesn't handle "unexpected events" nor signal/noise ratio very well. Maybe free space on disk was less than the 8 Gb needed to dump RAM (shouldn't have needed the full 8 Gb though) and this caused some kind of panic overwrite which trashed the controller?
Anyways, I've attached an image of the motherboard and I am wondering - what does the top cable which reaches over the optical drive do? Is it connected to the logic-board?

sspott wrote:
** The volume Macintosh HD could not be repaired.
Looks to me like a fatal error on the hard disk. IMHO, the only solution is to boot from an external device, reformat the hard drive, and restore from backup. If you don't have a backup, you're in trouble. Boot from the external device, try to mount the int'l drive, and, if successful, back up as much as possible. Also, try running Disk Utility—it may be possible to fix it while booted from a different device, thought I wouldn't bank on it. At any rate, make sure to run an AHT afterwards, to check for possible hardware issues with the drive.
If the machine is still covered by AppleCare, take it to the store by all means. But they won't try to recover anything from the int'l drive, just check it, erase it if they don't find hardware issues, and re-install a fresh copy of the OS.
That's why you should always have at least 1 up-to-date backup (2, with one kept off-site, is better).

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Did you do anything in particular to get it to boot up? If I could get mine to boot then I could work with it. I've got an external monitor that might connect, but if not, I should be able to share the screen from my Mac Mini. But I can't get it to boot.
Also, what time zone are you in? Since the same problem happened to us both on the same day, I wonder if something in the date is causing a failure in sleep/wake. I've had my fingers crossed that when tomorrow rolls around it will boot up again. Crazy, perhaps, we'll see. You give me hope.

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There is no output from that command line? Maybe the pid changed.
I'll repeat what I am trying to find out...
1. You do a pmset -g on the terminal.
2. The output from that pmset should have a line that says "sleep 0 (imposed by n)" where n is some number.
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My Macbook Pro (early 2011) has become very slow after installing Maverick.
System is struggling to open any web pages, apps etc.. Even booting time is more than 5 mins. My macbook has 8 GB Ram and 750GM memory and also got 200GB of free space memory..
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etresoft a long time contributer to Apple Support Communities wrote a very useful app he called etrecheck which helps in diagnosing many problems caused by third party installs etc.. Go to his website, read his information and from there download and run the program according to his instructions
http://www.etresoft.com/etrecheck
Download, run and post the results back here.
Pete

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Situation:
I have a 15in Macbook Pro early 2011 that I can not shutdown nor can I run disk utility to repair any issues. I recently had it serviced to replace a failing hard drive.
Known issues:
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thetribes wrote:
Situation:
I recently had it serviced to replace a failing hard drive.
Take it back to where you had it serviced, there is usually a ~90 day guarantee
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My Macbook Pro (early 2008) won't boot, then booted, now won't boot again.

Hey all,
Summary:
My GF's Macbook Pro (Early 2008, non-unibody I believe) "died" earlier this year without notice or a cause for why, then it worked months later, then it didn't again.
Symptoms:
It stopped booting, with the only signs of life are:
The annoying boot sound that you hear right-away, like a winding sound. "Weeeeah woooo"
A fan turns on immediately after the sound.
The front light (on the open button) is solid.
The battery will light up and show how much juice is left.
The only thing to do from here is to hold down the power for 10 seconds.
Don't worry, my story gets more interesting...
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I tried a couple things, including taking the battery out, and LOW AND BEHOLD: IT CAME ON, like nothing happened! The screen was fine, the performance was fine, it updated (to the new Safari and iTunes, as an example) fine, and it restarted fine multiple times. One of the main reasons I wanted to get it working was to save some family pictures we had saved, so I started uploading the images to an image cloud site. I'm sending them at full-res so it takes a while and I go to sleep around 2 am so I'm not too late into the office in the morn. When I wake up, I go to check the image upload progress and the laptop is Off. I figure it just went into standby after finishing, so I hit the power button...
And it doesn't boot again. It's back to the same issue as before. I try doing what I did last time, then resetting the SMC, but nothing has worked this time.
Any ideas? It's out of warranty of course, which is why I'm here.
Thanks in advance!

Since no one else is answering, I’ll jump in.
Your story is interesting indeed. I’m not sure I can help you fix the Mac but it sounds like there is a reasonable chance of recovering the data.
I assume it came with installation disks. Will it boot from them? If so run Disk Utility from there and try to repair the system disk.
For the hardware problems on your Mac it is time to take it to Genius Bar at an Apple store for a free diagnosis and estimate of repairs.
Genius reservation http://www.apple.com/retail/geniusbar/ .
It could be your disk failing but it sounds more like flakey electronics in the system. Let’s assume is is the system board until a Genius tells you otherwise. If so, you can simply put the working system disk in an external enclosure, mount that on your other Mac and copy the data. Here is a source for the inexpensive hardware you would need:
Toolkit: http://eshop.macsales.com/item/OWC/TOOLKITMHD/
SATA enclosure: http://eshop.macsales.com/item/OWC/ES2.5BPU2W/
There are multiple directions to go from here. Let me know what happens when you try theses first options.

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As soon as you wake up your display, launch Terminal from your Applications > Utilites folder and enter the following command.
pmset -g
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(Small red ants were frequent visitors of my lap, when it was left unattended for an hour. They usually came out from beneath the keys when I am back Just saying... )

One more thing, I had my 1TB external HDD connected to the mac via USB, when all these happend. (http://www.wdc.com/en/products/products.aspx?id=470)

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http://support.apple.com/kb/HT5860
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tl;dr
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MacBook Pro 15 inch Early 2011
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Best.

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