Chosen Solution
On starting up the MacBook Pro early 2011 the bar is green as is the screen and logo and then doesn’t boot
Let’s do one test to see if we can isolate the issue. Restart your system but press the T key that should allow your system to enter in to Target Disk Mode if that works your screen should show either a FireWire or Thunderbolt port icon floating on the screen. If that works we know your dedicated GPU has failed. This is a common issue in this series. Let us know what happens!
@danj I would probably retire the system as a unit, transfer my hard drive and walk away from it. At that point I’d sell the 2011 for parts (no HD since I’m keeping it for the 2012), even though it works. Yes you lose money, but you can’t sell them for much and the buyer has a case against you if you GPU burns out within 30 days. They are known to fail and need to be sold accordingly. I would probably replace as a unit and buy a newer 2012 to avoid having to try multiple boards to dind a good one, and to avoid a situation with mismatched serial numbers since that’s a potential logostical mess since you need to remember the machine’s board and bottom cover do not match. What I would personally do is temporarily install a junk drive into my “new” 2012 and get the firmware current where I had MacOS prior as a step against EFI incompatibilities, but that would probably be it. After that, I’d swap the drives over and replace the HD cable if it wasn’t patched just to be safe if I noticed anything funky with the behavior of the system.
