My MBP won't boot at all. opinions, thoughts, recommendations are welcome

First off about three weeks ago my keyboard/trackpad started acting up, going on and off. I found it was from the heat that supposedly warps the brown colored wire in the battery bay and if you apply pressure it will make the keyboard/trackpad work. So I got that working.
Then I started getting kernel panics like crazy. Come to my MBP after a break wont wake from screen saver, shut down, turn on, boom kernel panic after kernel panic. Tried everything, reinstall, repair permissions, reset both pram and pmu, hardware test with nothing wrong in the results. By pure magic it seemed to just work after an hour or so of screwing with it.
A week goes by, turn it on and kernel panic. Ran through the possible fixes. Once again magic turns it on. It worked for exactly another week.
Yesterday, it happens again. I go to wake it from screen saver and it is frozen. Turn it off, turn back on, and kernel panic. I do my routine but nothing, not even magic.
****Current Problem (sorry if you read all that, needed to setup what led to this)****
Now heres the kicker, upon pressing the power button nothing happens. Black screen, hard drive makes the usual MBP noise, and the sleep light blinks in 3 blink intervals (ie blink-blink-blink,,,pause,,,blink-blink-blink,,,etc), and theres no chime.
I have searched everywhere and could not find any of these exact symptoms but have tried every possible troubleshooting step I have seen along the way.
If anyone has any insight on this it would be greatly appreciated.

quattrokawf wrote:
One of the slots for RAM on the logic board is/was fried and apple care is replacing it. I was truly surprised when the guy at the store said it was covered and I owed nothing.
Well, that sounds like a good resolution to me. I'm surprised that running one RAM module at a time and switching slots did not identify this.

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Hi @Chichiiii ,
Thank You for your inquiry.
I understand that when you power on your notebook it is unresponsive. You did state that the AC adapter is working and the battery is charging.
Here is a link to HP Notebook PCs - Computer Does Not Start (Windows 8), which has multiple links to help you determine the issue.
Good Luck!
Sparkles1
I work on behalf of HP
Please click “Accept as Solution ” if you feel my post solved your issue, it will help others find the solution.
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Quote from: Supershanks on 12-May-05, 08:28:54
1) Do u have any usb cables from your case front panel or Flash card/drive or usb hubs connected to the mobo if so unplug them.
2) Switch off computer & unplug mains lead the remove a module of memory leaving the remaining 1 in slot1 (nearest CPU)
if 1 doesn't apply or doesn't give any change try 2.
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I have unplugged all IDE devices and SATA devices. All that's in there is the 1 GB of RAM (it's a 1gb stick, not 512mb), graphics card and processor, still no picture :(

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Hello italo_brenner,
In order to get the best and most accurate response for your question, please submit your question onto the HP commercial forums. You have posted on the consumer forum, and you're using a commercial based system. The link below will allow you to submit your question. It is possible that you might have to create another profile.
Commercial Forum
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Raj wrote:
That is not the reason it didn't work. Here is the actual clarity:
*A retail Leopard DVD should be able to boot a new Macbook Pro unibody.*
So you are saying even if the driver for the controller on which the DVD drive sits is not available in the Leopard DVD you are using because the hardware was not manufactured at the time the Leopard release on the DVD was made, the OS should magically just boot? How is that possible? Unibody MacBook Pros have entirely NEW AHCI chipset - for which there won't be any drivers on the older Leopard DVD and as such the DVD wont be detected once the OS on the DVD loads. In cases where the chipset used is same (as in previous generations of MBP) it will boot.
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On my way home, I stopped at a Mac store and asked them to test this. They successfully booted a new Macbook Pro unibody from an older Leopard DVD. And this is why Apple is replacing my computer, because it is a hardware issue, not a software one.
Again - you fail to understand that whether or not the old DVD boots on a new machine all depends on how much hardware has changed and what hardware has changed. It may boot on some generation of machine because the basic chipset and graphics did not change or were handled generically by the drivers on the older DVD but it may totally refuse to boot on new gen machine which has totally different / incompatible hardware.
So your claim that any old Leopard DVD must continue to boot on any new machine is not really technically explainable.

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Sorry - missed that part about having used both USB ports...
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I got my backup drive #2 today and booted into the "OS X Utilities" screen and went into the disk utility. From within the disk utility, I can unlock drive #2 (it's encrypted like the others), and verify it, and it checks all OK. So all seems to be well with this drive.
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When I ran the update (which I already did on my imac with no problems), the ipod updater, quicktime and something else installed without problem. I came into the room to find that the Mac OS 10.4.4 updater had a red exclimation point next to it, and I had an error message that there was a problem with the update and that I needed to reboot. Restarting was my only option so I did. ibook would not start. It hung on the "starting OS X" screen forever (45 minutes). I force-restarted and booted in single-user mode. I have an app called AppleJack installed so I ran that (repairs permissions and such in single-user mode). I rebooted. Nothing. Blue screen of death.
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How is mail different than that?
Mail keeps mailboxes in their own separate Finder files.
Home -> Library -> Mail
Home -> Library -> Mail Downloads
Notice also that Mailboxes themselves have their own folders in
Home -> Library -> Mail -> Mailboxes
Addressbook keeps addresses for Mail in its own set of Finder Files.
Home -> Library -> Application Support -> Addressbook
iCal keeps it in
Home -> Library -> Calendars
Whereas Microsoft Office is simply everything in one user belongs to:
Home -> Documents -> Microsoft User Data -> Identities -> Main Identity -> Database
So in reality you have 4 different places, and simple data corruption inside the database file itself is not going to take out all of the data when you use Mail, Addressbook, and iCal. I find it is much more robust to use Mail, Addressbook, and iCal purely for the reason that data corruption is not as prevalent a problem when your database gets large.
Single user mode is not a good idea, until the data is actually backed up in some fashion. Once you are getting input/output errors, trying to get it out of a place where there is data corruption by using a data recovery program is the first step with Prosoft Data Rescue.
You may try to rebuild the database file too, which might work, but since your machine is suffering a lot of input/output errors, I'm suspicious of the health of your hard drive, and you are booting to a blue screen, single user mode may not be enough, even Disk Warrior may not be enough. Now's the time to get all the data off the hard drive into another in a safe place. Data Rescue may be able to recover it. If not, you may have to deal with a data recovery firm.

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HELP!
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Have you tried zapping the PRAM?
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squeakmaster, welcome to Apple Discussions.
Have you tried the following with one 512MB RAM stick:
1. Palce it in the first RAM slot. Does the Mac boot?
2. If so, remove the stick & place it in the second RAM slot. Does it boot?
3. If so, remove the stick & place it in the third RAM slot. Does it boot?
The results of this test should reveal (1) if the stick boots in one or more RAM slots, the RAM is good and (2) if it fails to boot in a RAM slot, there is a problem with that slot.
Do this with each of the tree RAM sticks & post back the results.
When the logic board was replaced, was the firmware updated to be compliant with OS X. (Note - The firmware is installed on a chip on the logic board.) Check your Mac's firmware (Boot ROM version) version. Mac OS X: Available firmware updates
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=86117 If an update is required, the update must be installed (using OS 9) BEFORE you install OS X.
Can you boot up in OS 9.x? If so you can use DIMM First Aid - Check & recover disabled (missing) RAM from Apple's latest firmware updates http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macos/10415
 Cheers, Tom

MBP won't boot after update!

I've got a late 2006 model. I'm hoping my problem isn't related to a hardware failure. I left it on during the day, came home, the fan was running hard and it was really hot. Performance was slow, but everything worked.
it was asking me to restart for the latest update anyway and I'd been putting it off for a day or two, so I decided to restart and let it go through with that.
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I'm not really familiar with what my options are here.

alphaflight wrote:
I've got about 300 GB of space, so that shouldn't be the issue.
No, that certainly isn't the issue! Just had to make sure.
If it's not a hardware issue which happened to coincide with the update, the update may be corrupted or not completed. If either is the case, and you have another Mac available, you can try downloading the update from Apple Support Downloads, booting the MBP into FireWire Target Disk Mode (if it will cooperate), and trying to install the update that way. I have not tried this method, so cannot say if it will work or not, but I would try it prior to the alternative, which is to reinstall the OS (or, better yet, clone a backup to the MBP).

My MBP won't boot at all. opinions, thoughts, recommendations are welcome

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