Chosen Solution
Tried everything. Macbook air was working fine. Just updated to El Capitan then it wouldn’t go to sleep (i.e. fan was on high even with the lid closed). I opened it back up, pressed the power button for afew seconds then got a message on a white screen that said “Device Restarted because of a problem…” Tried restarting again, and have been getting a plain white screen with no logo. Initially there was no chime either. Then after resetting PRM got the chime. Read one of the posts here so I removed the hard drive too. Reset SMC, tried pretty much everything. All I get is the white screen with chime no matter what I try. Unplugged battery, reseated the video cables, tried hooking up to exter screen/drive etc. Still nothing. Any troubleshooting help would be deeply appreciated
Try booting the computer while holding Command + R. This should boot the computer into the recovery partition. From there you can open Disk Utility and check the health of your Hard Drive. Once you open Disk utility select your hard drive and click the First Aid tab. Then click verify disk, if this comes back red your upgrade to El Capitan may have gotten corrupt. If you have a backup awesome, if not you can try to backup through target disk mode. You are able to reinstall Mac OSX through the recovery partition as well, you do not want to reformat your disk just install. The install should not touch your data but I recommend you have a backup first either way.
Sounds like os has been corrupted try reinstalling osx without formatting the drive
Does it boot while holding Command + S ?? I see you have already begun a reinstall but if there’s still no change see if it will boot into single-user mode. If still nothing happens try booting from an external device like a flash drive or external hard drive. Does it boot from there? Keep us posted!!! Update (11/23/2015) I have found a solution in case this is still an issue for you or anyone else. If you unplug the internal drive but plug in a bootable (I used a thunderbolt drive) It will begin to boot from that drive just fine but still not the internal. However it won’t boot from the bootable when the internal drive is actually plugged in. Why is this? Well the solid state is actually read by the machine at first so it attempts to boot from it, when it sees that the drive is defective or bad it errors out and stays at the white screen. In my scenario I grabbed a known-good SSD and plugged it in and it booted right up again. Apple logo and then into the OS. I’m not sure how to explain how it was recognized in another machine but isn’t working in the laptop we need it to work in but from what I can tell this is caused by a faulty SSD. I hope this is helpful to anyone else having these issues!
Judy, can you let us know if the problem was fixed?
Power Off MacBook, Disconnect HDD, Press and hold Option key then Press Power Button, screen will work and its show wifi name and cursor, immediately insert bootable usb, as it is Condition, reconnect hdd strip, then hit bootable media(usb)wait for loading and reinstall macOs, this fixed for me
I have the same issue on my Macbook Air. When I remove the ssd strip, then I can boot from the USB stick. But the disk utility don’t rescan the ssd after reconnect. Anybody knows an adapter for this kind of ssd’s to read out the date from another mac over the USB? It is the 6+12pin connector: https://www.heise.de/imgs/18/2/5/6/3/7/7…
