A most puzzling macbook core duo power issue

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macuser1x

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I have a macbook core duo that will simply not power up. With either battery or powercord, when pressing the power button "nothing" happens. No sound. No light. NOTHING. However, I you wait and just WAIT....sometimes like 20 minutes or more...it will suddenly power on and work just fine but the fans run at high speed always. When closing clamshell, no sleep, just runs as if it was left open. But, when going to apple menu and choosing sleep...behold sleeps.

But when trying to wake up, Nothing. Then wait maybe 2 minutes and the fans come on again high ....maybe a delay of 1 minute and a small high pitch "beep" and it does show the grayed out screen view of the desktop and progress bar shows and then full color screen shows as normal...and all appears to be fine....just the high fans stay on always, again.

ANY THOUGHTS?
 
Sounds like the macbook was a victim of a liquid spill spill or drop. Most likely needs a new logic board. Boot to another drive or disk to see if it acts the same way.
 
well i dissassembled the macbook and poked &pulled it all apart. Cleaned everything. pulled hd and found that it is fine and working in other setups...optical is fine...the airport is installed even tho before the tear down it said it could find no airport hardware....??? Found only a very small two spots of what appeard to be a dried pool of liquid crystalized...very much looked like battery residue...or ??milk?? But the pools were between the HD and the bottom shild piece of the unit...nothing appeared to be anywhere near any circuitry....but hey ya never know....

After assembly it still boots like before...but i found it interesting now ...that
i have a better sense of the insides... the computer does not need anyone to push the powerbutton...one only needs to plug it in to the ac cord and wait...the computer appears to do nothing but upon closer observation one does see the white front power light...light up for a second or two then hard drive small beep...then nothing...this repeats about 4 times then the fans spin up on full speed and the computer just boots normal and runs just absolutely perfectly until you put it to sleep or shut it down...then this cycle repeats....

i share this only in hopes it could help someone with similar situation assess or understand wht they are experiencing....AND of course i am open to any suggestions for potential repair...even replacing chips on the board ...NO FEAR!
 
macuser1x said:
Found only a very small two spots of what appeard to be a dried pool of liquid crystalized...very much looked like battery residue...or ??milk?? But the pools were between the HD and the bottom shild piece of the unit...nothing appeared to be anywhere near any circuitry....but hey ya never know....
Click to expand...

Very good chance there could be damage to the board underneath where liquid contacted it smoked some of the circuits.

Well since you have it apart, try disconnecting extra peripherals inside the machine. I'd start with completely pulling the airport card to see if that is making the machine freak out. Then maybe the optical and HD. always good to have some spare RAM chips lying around as well for testing. An ideal situation would be to disconnect everything except video and RAM then boot through an external firewire drive to narrow things down more beyond that.
 
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