Yikes! MacBook Pro shuts down and then the fans…

Wow! That was scary!

I was just using my MacBook Pro when the ‘low battery’ warning came on. I found the power adapter and plugged it in to the wall socket, and then connected it to the Mac. At this point the screen went blank….

When I pressed the power button to restart the Mac the machine started with the fans running at full speed (surprisingly noisy), and after a few seconds the ‘grey screen of death’ appeared. This was alarming. My first thought was that the Mac had had a complete meltdown, which was immediately followed by ‘when did I last do a full back up?’.

Starting in ‘disk mode’, caused the fans to run, and the screen was very dim.

Restarting the Mac from the systems disks showed that it was not a hardware failure. The hard disk appeared to be OK )phew!). I didn’t attempt to re-install the system.

My guess (and hope) was that it was a PRAM or PMU problem.

A quick dig on the Apple website, and I found the PRAM reset details:

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=2238

which appear to be just the same as for all the other Macs I have owned.

Tried a PRAM reset, and it didn’t work.

I then tried a PMU (power management unit) reset….

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=303319

And success!!! After reseting the PMU the MacBook Pro booted correctly…. What a relief!

I must remember to backup more regularly!!!