Saving private MacBook
Some time at late March, Apple pushed several updates for High Sierra, the last announced operating system to be supported on this Mac, and my MacBook Pro (2011, 15″, the dreadful ATi) attempted to start with a totally garbled screen, out of the blue, and barely visible artifacts on the screen in any mode whatsoever. Even if I would wait long enough to it to reach the internet recovery screen, it would then spin the fans to the maximum, and shut down in agony of heat. After a few restarts, pulling the battery out, trying to reset everything that can be accessed, removing memory modules and other vain attempts, I decided to read about what might have actually happened there, albeit apparently post-mortem.
It turned out that this model is despised even by the hard-core Apple fanboys for it hosts that dual graphics where the main one, ATi Radeon, is prone to failing and taking the whole boat down with it. Instead of salvaging what can be saved, like 16G of DDR SDRAM and SSD I’ve already spent money for, I decided not to throw it away in the bin immediately, but to read a bit more in the next days, still having hopes that there might be a solution, once I understand what actually happened.
Soon after I’ve stumbled upon something that I thought might work – in the single user mode, and typing by heart, because nothing can be seen clearly on the screen, I guess I had forced it to use only the Intel’s card on the next boot:
nvram fa4ce28d-b62f-4c99-9cc3-6815686e30f9:gpu-power-prefs=%01%00%00%00
That worked, the display came apparently normal, and I promptly seized a chance to install a Fedora, as 32 just came out. Fedora 32 brought almost everything out of the box, and after installing RPMFusion repos, and adding broadcom-wl via akmod there, even camera worked perfectly! For three days I was happy. Yet, I forgot to attempt to permanently solve the graphics issue, and since it was apparently all good with the graphics under linux, I thought that the issue was a matter of the past. But, soon after and suddenly again, something (NVRAM?) tried to use that fried ATi after a reboot again the way it already had happened, and the problem occurred again, this time without possibility to again turn off the ATi on the next boot, because there’s only Fedora on the hard-disk now. So this time, GRUB2 edit-on-boot was required, again typing the following in the linux kernel boot line at the end:
i915.lvds_channel_mode=2 i915.modeset=1 i915.lvds_use_ssc=0
That made it for linux, and I’ve later used grubby to assure those will persist across the reboots.
A true permanent solution seems to be a hardware hack that includes messing with the soldering iron on the motherboard, but I am still not willing to try that too, as long as this can keep the TrashBook Pro – I’m convinced now that this is a common nick for this late 2011 model – running a linux in the future.
Hope this helps saving your TrashBook too, at least for a while!