Chosen Solution

Hi my MacBook suddenly went to the black screen and just died. When I tried restarting it goes past the apple logo and then just stays on a white screen and won’t boot up. I have to run internet recovery and do a disk utility check in order to get it too boot up (not always guaranteed this works). Eventually after a few hours the same thing happens again, black screen and then dies(even with the power pack plugged in). I have done the following but nothing has helped Reset smc and the prom. Run hardware diagnostics and no faults found Run disk utility and no issues found with hard disk. Reinstalled macOS When it fails and I try and boot with option +r the logo screen appears green, could it be a graphics card issue? Tried apple support but they say they don’t support this. Model any more(MacBook Pro 15" mid 2011) Any ideas and help would be much appreciated. Thanks

The white screen is usually caused by either a defective hard drive cable (extremely common on this model) or a failed hard drive or a combination of the two. To diagnose. get an SATA to USB 2 adapter, remove the drive and hook it up externally and see if your problem persists. Sometimes diagnostics is a process of elimination. Don’t do or jump ahead and start buying things until we are pretty sure of what the cause is. UPDATE here’s how to change the cableMacBook Pro 15" Unibody Late 2011 Hard Drive/IR Sensor Cable Replacement

I did have the same problem.To make the long story short, the problem was graphic chip (known problem with Unibody models from 2011) The good thing is that you do not need to replace the whole board, only graphic chip (cost about $ 85 plus installation).