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Solved Late 2011 MBP Having Issues

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Nick

Professional moneywaster
PCHF Member
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Sep 2, 2016
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Washington, USA
Hi PCHF,
My friend has a late 2011 MacBook Pro (15.4") and it's been acting up lately. It is a victim of the graphics card problem that some 2011-2012 MBP's were prone to having where it'd distort the display and show random lines all over, but I think there also might be a problem with the installation of OS X. When you start the computer up, it goes straight to the login screen after the Apple logo, but after you put in your password, it shows the loading bar which gets to the halfway mark before going to a blank gray screen and doing nothing, which I think is an attempt to restart. When I hold down "option" on the keyboard while it's starting, it shows the Macintosh HD startup disk and the available WiFi networks, and when I select Macintosh HD, I get the same issue. If I hold down "shift" while it's starting up, It shows all that crazy repair stuff and tries to do something before it restarts and shows the classic "your Mac shut down because of a problem" screen. If I hold down "Command+R" while starting up to try and enter Recovery/Safe mode, it shows the Apple logo with the loading bar underneath indicating that's it's trying to boot into safe mode, but the bar gets halfway full before the computer just shuts off. I tried popping in an appropriate Windows 7 installer disc and pressed "C" while it was booting up to see if I could get Bootcamp working and install Windows, but no luck. Just a blank screen. Same result when I hold "option" on the keyboard to get to the boot options and select the "Windows" disc. It's really weird because just earlier today, I was able to get it to boot up into Mac OS X Yosemite just fine (or El Capitan? I can't remember what's installed on it) without a problem and use the laptop like normal... Does anyone know what could be going on?
 
Update: no matter what I do now, when I try to boot it up, it shows the apple logo and the loading bar which gets halfway full before the screen goes gray and the fans ramp up.
 
Another update:
I followed everything in this guide, and resetting the NVRAM got the startup chime back and I was able to get back to the login screen but when you logged in, it got halfway there and failed, like usual. The only thing I have left to do is an OS reinstall but the person who owns this laptop really doesn't care about it anymore so I'm calling it toast.
 
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