Last weekend, I finally decided to see if I could get it into working shape again. To start, I took the back off and removed the failed SSD drive. The MBP is too old to run a current version of MacOS, but it still has a working HD drive, so I decided to install Linux there.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
To fix the keys, I tried removing the key caps and cleaning the switches, but after putting them back together they still failed. By chance however, I noticed that if I *smashed* the key beside one of the failed ones (in frustration? \ud83d\ude42 ) then the original keys would start working for a bit. This led me to pulling that other key cap off and cleaning it, and after putting it back together all the keys worked.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This only left me with the random kernel panics, so I booted the Mac into hardware test mode and let it do a full test. Even after 10 minutes of hammering RAM and CPU (with the fans screaming), there were no failures, so I chalked the problem up to either a Mac driver issue, or something to do with the now removed SSD.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
For linux, I just went with Ubuntu, mostly because there was a tutorial about installing on Macs that seemed pretty reasonable. The only wrinkle was the lack of a driver for the MBP’s discrete graphics card. I went for the easy option of doing I don’t think it’s worth putting a new battery in it, but if I needed a home computer for email and web browsing this would be perfectly useful. Nice!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I had an old, broken 2009 MacBook Pro sitting on a shelf because I had never gotten around to trying to fix it. It had three significant issues: Last weekend, I finally decided to see if I could get it into working shape again. To start, I took the back off and removed the failed […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13,10,1],"tags":[81,89],"class_list":["post-1771","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mac","category-tech","category-uncategorized","tag-linux","tag-macbook"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mikew.ca\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1771","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mikew.ca\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mikew.ca\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mikew.ca\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mikew.ca\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1771"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/mikew.ca\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1771\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2859,"href":"https:\/\/mikew.ca\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1771\/revisions\/2859"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mikew.ca\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1771"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mikew.ca\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1771"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mikew.ca\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1771"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}nomodeset<\/code> in grub, and ended up with…<\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/mikew.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/02\/IMG-1.jpeg\")
<\/a><\/figure>\n<\/figure>\n\n\n\n